eBay, the popular online selling site has announced a few changes in their listing fee, which has resulted in mixed reactions from sellers. Earlier, eBay used to charge a certain amount of fee to list products to be auctioned, but now they plan to decrease the fee or even do away with the whole idea of paying a fee in the U.S.
While this should actually please sellers and vendors, those who sell in low volumes may end up paying more than they are made to believe. Firstly, eBay uses PayPal for many transactions and that fee is nowhere mentioned on the eBay site, thus resulting in a lack of transparency. Secondly, though one pays the same $15.95/month subscription fee, low volume sellers pay an additional 20-cent insertion fee.
This has resulted in some disgruntled eBay sellers and vendors. Nevertheless, both low volume and high volume listings would appear in “Core” search results. The fee-change would be extended to Europe and U.K too, where eBay is doing pretty well. It would be interesting to observe if the changes would affect the burgeoning Asian market as well.
While it is still not clear if the fee-change/reduction would be advantageous to some sections of vendors and disadvantageous to others, it is pretty clear that eBay is making some serious changes in the way online selling and buying is carried out.
