I have noticed that eBay have been making a few changes recently. The first is that they will be introducing higher charges for selling items. Although the fee for listing an item will decrease from 15p to 10p, EBay’s cut of the final selling price will actually increase. This will mean that the fee charged will increase from 5.25% to 7.5% that’s roughly 68p extra per item sold. It doesn’t sound like a lot and perhaps it isn’t if you just list the odd item every now and again. For those people that make a living selling on eBay however, it is likely to mean they will have increase their prices in order to make it worthwhile. Personally I have stopped listing on eBay altogether recently because it is expensive to keep relisting products and I often find that I spend more on fees in a month that I actually make from the listings. Not only do you have to take into the listing fee, the final value fee but if your customers pay via Paypal (owned by eBay) then they take a another cut for the transaction. There is good news, however for power sellers who will get discounts of up to 40% on the final value fees, but it does make me wonder if eBay is pushing out the small sellers.
The second change is that eBay are making changes to the way their feedback system works. The change means that eBay sellers will no longer be able to leave neutral or negative feedback for buyers although buyers will still be able to leave negative feedback for sellers. eBay are introducing the changes because they believe that it will encourage buyers to be more honest when leaving feedback as they will not fear receiving negative feedback in return. On a quick visit to the eBay forums I noticed that this change has left many sellers wondering what they should do if a buyer proves to be untrustworthy. The majority of comments are from people who have experienced fraudulent transactions from buyers in the past and feel that the new feedback changes will leave them unable to highlight these fraudulent buyers so that other users know to avoid them. It will be interesting to see how these new changes affect eBay but one thing is for sure there are certainly a lot of very unhappy people out there at the moment.