From September 4th, eBay.co.uk will be switching Private Sellers over to the eBay.com practice of charging Final Value Fees, FVFs, on the combined total of Selling Price and Postage charges. No doubt they will be claiming it is to stop sellers ripping off customers with extortionate postage charges but it will be mainly to insure they get their full 10%. So watch out for more increased prices all round to try and recoup the cut taken by eBay. It will probably also herald the end of people posting auction style listings altogether. Hey ho, I'm sure eBay are just 'doing what is in the best interests' for their customers .... again

Full details in the news release here:

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/uk/201...id=p3984.m2301.l3955

so if I put a card on ebay starting at 99p and I put £1 to post because that's how much it would be.

How much of my 99p will I end up with?

quote:

Originally posted by wolfie:
so if I put a card on ebay starting at 99p and I put £1 to post because that's how much it would be.

How much of my 99p will I end up with?

Probably enough to buy a Mars bar...maybe...oh, drat, there's the Paypal fees on top of that too. Make that a CurlyWurly bar instead.

It's very convenient that Royal Mail's prices recently went up too and in some cases extortionately for their new parcel classification.

A Gentle Giant bust I recently sold had to go Medium Parcel(anything over 6" inches cubed is a Medium parcel) and that cost £8.90 1st Class(I don't trust 2nd class, and the less time a parcel is in the post the safer it is!). Before April's increase it would have been £7.40 1st Class or £5.30 Standard parcels. The latter has been discontinued...I wonder why.

Anyway, the point is, £8.90 gives ebay quite a percentage of my hard-earned pennies for doing nothing, and essentially taking it from what it actually costs to post something, as I never charge extra for packing etc.
Great way to turn away sellers, ebay!?!

quote:

Originally posted by wolfie:
so if I put a card on ebay starting at 99p and I put £1 to post because that's how much it would be.

How much of my 99p will I end up with?

Hm, well eBay will take 20p FVFs, Paypal will take 27p (3.4% + 20p per transaction) so that will leave you with 53p. Of course, that doesn't include anything for your time packing and posting it or the envelope/jiffy bag used or the toploader and penny sleeve. So basically, not a lot

More day light robbery as we speak

Thanks for the answers.........I think.

I may start wolfiebay.

It's got to the stage now where I contact the buyers and sellers I have been dealing with over the last ten or so years on Ebay and deal with them direct. I suspect I am not the only one doing this either.

From what I have seen over the last couple of years Ebay are only really interested in large scale operations and would prefer it if the small private sellers of low value items went away .

quote:

Originally posted by Kevin F:
From September 4th, eBay.co.uk will be switching Private Sellers over to the eBay.com practice of charging Final Value Fees, FVFs, on the combined total of Selling Price and Postage charges. No doubt they will be claiming it is to stop sellers ripping off customers with extortionate postage charges but it will be mainly to insure they get their full 10%. So watch out for more increased prices all round to try and recoup the cut taken by eBay. It will probably also herald the end of people posting auction style listings altogether. Hey ho, I'm sure eBay are just 'doing what is in the best interests' for their customers .... again

Full details in the news release here:

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/uk/201...id=p3984.m2301.l3955

Thanks for the info/update, I hadn't picked up on this, not that I sell much these days due to the hassle

Were you to question how they can charge fees from the shipping cost you charge even when you are demonstrably not gouging the buyer, Ebay would tell you with varying degrees of straightforwardness that they simply want all sellers to give "free" shipping and roll all costs of postage and any handling fees into the bid or buy it now price.

My feeling has always been that if the shipping is an obviously fair rate and you can start your auctions at a lower price (since you aren't adding the shipping into it), you will ultimately get more bids and realize the same and even sometimes higher sale prices, which would also benefit Ebay in higher final value fees.

They do not agree that is the best course.

The goal for Ebay is to be able compete with giant sellers like Amazon in every way, chief among them Amazon's lengthy returns window and their ability to offer free shipping on most orders. Ebay also wants sellers to ship as quickly as Amazon does, which is why the fee discounts that are offered if you ship by the next business day after payment consistently. Of course, Amazon has a lot of people to do that, and most of us have just ourselves to do the work, so it's a trick if your selling any sort of volume to stay above the 90% rate to be eligible for the 20% fee discount reward.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: chesspieceface,

quote:

Originally posted by chesspieceface:

Ebay also wants sellers to ship as quickly as Amazon does, which is why the fee discounts that are offered if you ship by the next business day after payment consistently.

What's to stop an ebay seller marking an item as shipped but then taking a lot longer to actually ship the item? I'm guessing nothing. That is clearly happening on a regular basis with one well known UK card seller I use. If they receive a fee discount then that would explain it.

quote:

Originally posted by Zero:

quote:

Originally posted by chesspieceface:

Ebay also wants sellers to ship as quickly as Amazon does, which is why the fee discounts that are offered if you ship by the next business day after payment consistently.

What's to stop an ebay seller marking an item as shipped but then taking a lot longer to actually ship the item? I'm guessing nothing. That is clearly happening on a regular basis with one well known UK card seller I use. If they receive a fee discount then that would explain it.

in the U.S. to qualify for the discount you only have to process the order and upload the tracking number in one business day. I think you have up to 3 days to actually ship it.

That's right, and here, Ebay is trying to get everyone to buy postage through Ebay as well. You get a discount on shipping and while it goes unsaid, you actually get a couple of extra days to actually mail the item since the moment you've paid for the shipping online, you qualify as having sent the item right then, whether you did or didn't.

If paying for the postage at the post office, you only get the actual tracking number right then, so going by that method, you don't get the shipping discount and you do have to literally have the package in the mail within one business day. The reason I use that method though is because I still have some international packages to send, and those have to be presented to a clerk to get the Registered mail tracking number, plus I get my own mail and packages at the post office, so I have to go down there pretty much every day anyway. It all means my shipping methods are pretty much unchanged since 1998 when I started.

The funny thing is, I've done what was required to be a Top Rated seller since long before they had the reward program for doing so, but it did come with its reward in a way, and that was and remains this: buyers are much more likely to be happy with what they've bought from you (and maybe come back for more) if they get what they ordered quickly. I've learned that as a buyer and a seller.

It appears that ebay is also going to put the small post offices out of business. For example: my nearest Post Office is in my village and being a village Post Office it is very small and has been threatened with closure more than once. It depends on people using it by buying postage etc, so by using ebay and paying for the postage on line will mean that it will receive no income but will still be expected to handle items for posting if too large for the pillar box.

Fortunately I don't sell on ebay so it won't be a problem for me but I'm sure it will affect others.

Right, and all of these previously mentioned factors are in the service of ultimate goal of eliminating non Ebay transactions between people who have come in contact with each other because of Ebay, with every offsite deal cutting Ebay out of final value fees they understandably feel entitled to.
It's hard to argue they don't deserve a piece of the action, but as always, the percentage that is fair remains the main debate between Ebay and its sellers.

I really wonder how ebay can get away with this in the UK and the US. In Germany eBay wouldn't be allowed by federal law to charge a fee on a service they don't provide. They could rise their fees for the total of selling price, but federal laws forbid them to charge fees for postage.

I've also noticed that Germany seems to be the only eBay country were you can choose not to use Paypal at all for your auctions. eBay Germany makes you use Paypal until you have 50 feedbacks and after that you can disable Paypal as payment method which the majority of sellers does because no one wants to pay the extra Paypal fees.

In this case (eBay and Paypal) I'm glad that German federal law is very strict and won't allow practices that are happening on eBay US and eBay UK.

quote:

Originally posted by estephano:

I've also noticed that Germany seems to be the only eBay country were you can choose not to use Paypal at all for your auctions. eBay Germany makes you use Paypal until you have 50 feedbacks and after that you can disable Paypal as payment method which the majority of sellers does because no one wants to pay the extra Paypal fees.

Also in Australia eBay can't force sellers to use paypal.

It comes as no surprise to any of us living in the UK that we can get ripped off by anyone and there is nothing we can do about it.