[Gary]

UK Ebay have announced changes to their fees for "Toys and Games". You now pay a lower insertion fee which includes the gallery image however there is a BIG sting in the tail. How long before model railways are reclassified as Toys?

Toys & Games Category:-

Final Selling Price
Final Value Fee between 23 October and 31 December

£0.01 - £29.99
Old 5.25% for the amount of the high bid (at the listing close for auction-style listings) up to £29.99
New 8.20% for the amount of the high bid (at the listing close for auction-style listings) up to £29.99

£30.00 - £599.99
Old 5.25% of the initial £29.99 (£1.57), plus 3.25% of the remaining closing value balance
New 8.20% of the initial £29.99 (£2.46), plus 5.50% of the remaining closing value balance

Over £600.00
Old 5.25% of the initial £29.99 (£1.57), plus 3.25% of the initial £30.00 - £599.99 (£18.53), plus 1.75% of the remaining closing value balance
New 8.20%of the initial £29.99 (£2.46), plus 5.50% of the initial £30.00 - £599.99 (£31.35), plus 2.50% of the remaining closing value balance

Merry Xmas eBay!

This of course does not affect buyers. My view is buyers should contribute towards the eBay fees like they do in any normal auction where a buyers premium is charged. Normally auction fees are split 50/50 between the buyer and seller.

If they introduce a similar fee structure to the collectables section then selling on eBay would become questionable with sellers fees of 15% or more for small items of £10 taking Paypal into account. And then you have the incredibly high shipping costs! The thought of giving eBay/Paypal £1.50 to sell a £10 item is a joke!

Happy modelling
Gary

PS this is going to seriously hit my diecast/Scalextric/kit buddies

 

[Brian Considine]

Gary - how do these prices compare with Vectis then ?

 

[Gary]

Its not a question of comparing eBay charges with those of professional auctioneers based in warehouses. The point is eBay do not seem capable of maintaining a constant fee structure. They constantly twiddle (increase?) with their charges unlike auctioneers.

Auctioneers do all the work for you remember. All you do is send the goods in and they do all the photography and prepare the listings for their catalogue and auction.

Ebay/Paypal make you do all this yourself and now charge you 15% if you are selling toys! If eBay did all the listing work then fair enough.

I have a sneeking suspicion this is the start of fee increases across the eBay empire.

Who else could increase their charges by 50% or more in the current climate?

I know! I'll charge 50% more for my model railway items!

Happy modelling
Gary

 

[Robert Stokes]

They could end up pricing themselves out of the market. If this fee structure spreads across all items, then the number of things under £10 being sold is likely to drop considerably. I don't know of any big, on-line rival to ebay but I wouldn't be surprised if one didn't emerge.

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted via this site by someone with something to sell after I mentioned that I was interested in getting one. We ended up doing a mutually beneficial deal with no fees. Is there a case for this site having a for sale/wanted section? Of course, it would have to be understood that the organisers could in no way be responsible for any deal which went sour.

 

[Gary]

QUOTE If this fee structure spreads across all items, then the number of things under £10 being sold is likely to drop considerably.

Exactly my thinking. That is a fair proportion of model railway stuff. Online retailers could actually do very well out of this eBay move as they will be the only source of sub £10 (or even £20) model railway stuff. The issue is they don't stock most of what eBay currently offers sub £10 unless they open up BIG secondhand departments!

Let us remember that eBay UK is the only Ebay platform where model railways are classified as collectables. They are classified as toys elsewhere so if this move is replicated across the eBay empire then it will have an immediate impact everywhere except the UK.

Happy modelling
Gary

 

[Gary]

Interesting that eBay are experimenting with a 33% fee reduction in the USA! They claim that they expect average selling prices to drop as a result as there mill be more listings and more competition:-

QUOTE eBay expect average selling prices to drop
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
Last night eBay held their quarterly conference call where they give investors a forecast of future business and the opportunity to ask questions on the state of the eBay business. It was no surprise that profits took a hit from writing off $900m from Skype a few weeks back. To balance that the StubHub business eBay acquired at the begining of the year is booming.

As ever PayPal is the engine behind eBay's financial success in recent years with revenues up 35% on this time last year. PayPal is the most astute investment eBay have ever made both to enable transactions on eBay and as a burgeoning off eBay business.

What is surprising is that for the last two conference calls there has been no mention of eBay Express! Meg Whitman last mentioned it in January stating "eBay Express continues to experience increased adoption and growing success". That growing success now appears either to have stalled or simply not worth mentioning. It's certainly not the focus for investors as a vibrant part of the eBay business portfolio.

What may not please sellers on eBay.com is an expected drop in average selling prices over the next few weeks, however welcome that may be to buyers. Talking about the three week 33% reduction in selling fees Meg said "we expect listings to increase; we except successful items to increase; we anticipate perhaps ASPs will go down".

It's an interesting experiment and one that eBay have never tried before, will a significant decrease in listing fees trigger an increase in listings to balance eBay's finances? Will sellers list in greater volumes and will that drive down prices, but in turn if that increase sell through rates could sellers overall profits increase even if at lower margin per sale? Will it cause a significant shift from Shop Inventory Format to auction and BIN listing formats? eBay themselves are unsure of the impact but "were very much in favor of saying let's see what happens when we take a pretty significant sustained decrease in insertion fee in our largest market."

There's may be something for UK sellers to look forward to. Meg did say "You'll also see many of our markets around the world launch similar tests this quarter" so massive price decreases just might appear in the UK before Christmas

I like the last part of the quote! What was that about something for UK sellers to look forward to?

Happy modelling
Gary

 

[Gary]

Forget eBay's greed. There are far more important things in life!

The white guinea pig escaped and has been running around the back garden for the last half hour hiding in the brambles. Trust me. Life would would have been very grim had the white guinea pig not been recaptured in time for the return of junior from school!

Happy modelling
Gary

 

[Doug]

Christmas = Toys and Games.

This is the time of year when people buy that sort of stuff. eBay is just being greedy - as we know they already are.

 

[pedromorgan]

"Who else could increase their charges by 50% or more in the current climate?
I know! I'll charge 50% more for my model railway items! "

Thats exactly what Romford/Markits did!!

Its very sad but ebay had a huge loss last quater and it seems pretty dry recently. they have taken the bankmanagers answer to increasing turnover (put up your prices) instead of improving their service or keeping in fresh. i cant see any significant changes to the site since i first used it a few years ago. its just stale.

that said, if E-bay dissapeared would we miss it?

I think the novelty has gone.

Peter

 

[Gary]

The inserttion fees have come down and gallery images are to be free for the duration. You can actually list on eBay with a gallery image for 5p!

All things considered for items that have a final value of less than £9 you do save an overall 2p on normal listing and final value fees.

And for a £3 item you do save 14p on normal combined listing and final value fees.

So I apologise to eBay if I have missread the situation but for low value items it does appear that listing costs have come down. And if you list something and don't sell it then you are out of pocket by less.

So good move or bad?

You decide...

Happy modelling
Gary

PS I am still recovering from shock of the guinea pig hunt in the back garden. That was a very tense life or death affair as next doors cat would have had it had I given up.

 

[7113]

QUOTE (Gary @ 30 Oct 2007, 12:27) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>The white guinea pig escaped and has been running around the back garden for the last half hour hiding in the brambles. Trust me. Life would would have been very grim had the white guinea pig not been recaptured in time for the return of junior from school!

I must admit a very tenuos link to modelling but this did make me chuckle, visions of our Gary scrambling around the garden on his hands and knees shouting come here you little

!

Thanks for that.

Regards

 

[alastairq]

time to train said white guinea pig in un-armed combat?

Go on eBay and buy it an AK47?

[purely to deal with next-door's cat, of course?]

 

[goedel]

QUOTE (alastairq @ 30 Oct 2007, 18:06) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>time to train said white guinea pig in un-armed combat?
[purely to deal with next-door's cat, of course?]
Our cat got on well with our six guinea pigs when we had them. When the neighbour's cat sat on top of their outside run they were at first cautious but were soon running round eating the grass in front of its nose, safe behind the chicken wires... Another day and a neighbour phoned to say that they were in her garden nibbling on her flowers! Three had escaped for a whole day and come to no harm, in fact had done rather well stuffing themselves with foreign flora! Unfortunately foxes got two of them in the end but that was my fault for leaving them outside in insecure runs over night...in the summer obviously!! They normally lived in the garage at summer and in the porch with the shoes in winter.

Strangely all our other pets were afraid of our corn snake for some reason or another...instinct from evolution perhaps that anything with scales is to be avoided at all costs?! The corn snake outlives all our other pets, consisting at some time or the other of a cat, guinea pigs, goldfish and a hamster. In fact the snake is now 12 and should easily make it to 20 with such a slow lifestyle...

Regarding eBay, perhaps sellers will be forced to sell pairs or trios of wagons/coaches etc. i.e. increase the contents of the average lot to take into account the increased fees, if they arrive for model trains that is. I wonder how any fee changes in Europe will affect eBay.de(and .fr .at .ch .nl too) because I'm almost always chasing models from Europe...?

 

[neil_s_wood]

QUOTE (BRITHO @ 31 Oct 2007, 04:00) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>I must admit a very tenuos link to modelling but this did make me chuckle, visions of our Gary scrambling around the garden on his hands and knees shouting come here you little

!

Thanks for that.

Regards
I wonder if there's any photos of that?

 

[Sol]

Outside of the e-bay dilema, seing a photo of Gary attempting to locate a poor small defenceless animal would be worth a lot to us on this forum & then sold on e-bay!

 

[Brian Considine]

Gary,

Before you interpret this any other way I am not anti Vectis. I asked a simple question which was ignored. I simply want to make a comparison regarding fees.

I would tend to agree that for genuinely rare items Vectis may very well be the better bet than eBay. However for sheer speed of selling & getting the funds in your hands eBay will always be faster.

Whether you use eBay or Vectis, you still have to pack the goods up & send them somewhere at some point (& of course someone has to bear the costs of returning anything that is not sold at a real, or as you call it professional auction), it really is not much trouble to take a few digital photos & compose a description.

For the buyer it really does not matter who pays what part of the commission, or how much the postage/shipping is, it's the total price it costs that matters

I agree that eBay is getting greedy, but you have to remember that they are Swiss owned & although not a complete monopoly they must have most of the general internet auction market worldwide. Even if many people find other ways they will still make shedloads of money.

In a way eBay are like microsludge - we may not like them, but we are stuck with them (& before the Apple/Linus supporters comment, not all programmes will work with these, albeit more stable systems.)

 

[Makemineadouble]

I have noted from several posts that there is a certain anti E-Bay feeling amongst some members of this forum. Over the last 12 months I have completely disposed of all my considerable stock of OO on Ebay this exceeded £10,000 at Ebay prices. I've hardly had a glitch and it's been generally a good experience. I tried dealers for a one time deal, they were rip off artists who were not even clever. DCC had them mystified, sound ! Well that is another story. During this time I've restocked with narrow gauge (On30) bought in the main from Dealers in the states on Ebay because prices are so good compared with the UK, this has also been a good experience. Why pay £18 or £19 for a freight car when I can get on Ebay for $8 -$10 there is a huge difference. With Ebay I've bought and sold cameras until I reached the grade of camera I wanted. I bought a Panasonic FZ30 from a dealer in Hong Kong from whom I extracted several free gifts because the delivery was delayed by four days, I paid £230 for the camera used it for a year, and sold it on for £205.00 this what I call a good deal. The same with my lathe and it's tooling, I literately got a bargain with the machine but the tooling was for pennies all on Ebay.

Yes Ebay has expensive fees, but it's a great trading platform, and I will continue to use it when ever I consider it appropriate.

 

[Avionyx]

I don't think eBay's fees are THAT outrageous. of course they are higher than they used to be, but then again eBays usage figures are far higher too.

The great thing about eBay is that it is a consistently competitive market. In the "real world" you'll go to a shop because its local, or because you like the help you get, or it has the best stock of what you need.

On eBay everyone has to be competative, their products aren't being played off against each other in a catalogue, they are being compared side by side (or above and below each other is more technically correct) If you search for Class XYZ then its all there, on one page; prices, postage, description and you compare one persons sale directly with another.

I'm not saying that the fees are particularly fair, but the its a unique market place and there's a lot of money to be made for those who are willing to put in the time to make it so. Which begs the question, why shouldn't they be allowed to put up their prices if they've got such a good product.

My opinion is that they should!

Alex

 

[Robert Stokes]

People advertising on ebay have to be competetive but ebay itself has no real competitor. It is a virtual (in both senses of the word) monopoly.