It may seem farcical to a business but as a business you should also know that there is always resistance to change, especially price increases and more especially when virtually every buyer has been battered with frozen tax allowances, huge utility bill and cost of living (food,rent etc) increases.
No, "they don't understand" much beyond the fact that many are finding that there is 'too much month at the end of their pay'. Under those circumstances it isn't very clever to suddenly slap a 'new' fee on every purchase from a private or "private" seller. Especially when it's a 'well known fact' that ebay makes billions in profit every year, it looks like profiteering even if the buyer is often paying slightly less than they were when the seller was including but hiding the previous fees.
Ebay has been thinking that resistance to every change will smooth itself out and everything will go back to normal for years, IMO at least since MP and loss of paypal. But has it really?
Up to some point ebay announced its numbers of Active Buyers AND Sellers, but then decided to stop reporting the numbers of sellers. Any company highlights its good results in the reports and tries to bury the bad. We know that active buyers have been falling since before Covid (which produced an upward blip), but they have been falling or stagnating for years. I'd guess that active seller numbers look even worse and that's why they are no longer made public.
Ebay still makes profits but increasingly not by selling stuff, but by payment processing, increasing fees and inventing new ones (Sponsorship). It's moved the site towards quick selling, volume selling businesses and away from slow selling, low volume private sellers. So one can only assume that it's private sellers who have been leaving every time ebay has changed something that makes the site less useful / more difficult for them to use.
Loss of paypal / MP / IS / increased payment holds all came at intervals allowing things to smooth over. But the loss of visibility without sponsorship has become blatant. Now ebay has (perhaps) decided to tackle the "private" seller problem by introducing more payment holds, a buyer fee on private sales with more restrictions yet to come.
Is it working? Are businesses rushing to register properly? Or have these changes just made ebay even more useless for private sellers who will still sell next to nothing without promoting, will have their pay-outs made slower and face restrictions on delivery.
