Free listing and no fees for private sellers

[lord_and_lady_m]

Some private sellers have received a stonking offer.

Free to list

Free to sell

Until April! 

Don't know what the T's & C's look like but damn I could do with those types of offers. 

[the-nutwood-collection]

Did you not have to advertise and continue to advertise in order to get those sales and grow the site?  And that's not cheap.

Keyword advertising isn't cheap, but a card transaction fee is around 1.9% +20p, which leaves a lot of wriggle room to pay for ads to get the site established.

[oakley_home_and_gifts]

The issue a lot of sellers have with ebay they keep claiming to support small businesses yet many of their policies and actions say otherwise. 

I get a lot of ebay's competition for private sellers is from likes of Facebook marketplace, Vinted etc and if they want to compete with that and offer free listings and fees for genuine private sellers. I don't have a problem with that as I would also take advanatage of that with my private account. But do more then to tackle the accounts who clearly run a business and able to undercut business who want to support the site day in and day out. I know competitors who have 3 or 4 different accounts selling the same type of items but nothing is ever done. And do more to offer businesses a better package espicially with the number of listings. 

[btr.style]

'I don't see how it's really an issue against business sellers, even if they private sellers do undercut. As long as they are actual private sellers and not masquerading as a business, they should only have one item to sell. Which shouldn't really affect your sales in the main.'

That's the issue though, many of these are actual business sellers on private accounts to get the fee promos.

I've witnessed this first hand. There are 3 private business sellers in particular who have targetted us with undercutting on prices of some items they have from the same supplier as us. They list their item, undercut us by £5 and even though no returns accepted, make the sale. Then right away list another or revise a dummy listing into another of that item and once again undercut us by the same amount and make the sale. 

This lowers the 'going rate'. Meaning we have to drop our prices to match theirs. They just undercut us by another £5 almost right away and continue with the sales. 2 of them have several accounts which clearly all get the fee promo so they can list 1 on each account, flooding the market and search results and gaining the sales. 

At the end of the season we have to pack the majority of that product line away after they've sold all/most of theirs and when the season comes round again, the demand on that product could well have dropped so it will become dead stock or items we have to sell at a loss. 

People go for the lowest price unfortunately and even though we have the upper hand with returns accepted, a nice logo and better presentation of listings, it doesn't mean much on eBay if someone has the same thing at a lower price. 

[therenewalworkshopltd]

I don't disagree with that at all.

But if you are seeing sellers like that, are you not reporting them?

If nothing else, with the new reporting to HMRC, it should slowly remove this as well.

They are a pain the backside, but you get this on most sites.  Even on Amazon, where they can be draconian over this kind of thing, it still happens regularly.

But if these kind of sellers are regularly reported, it should slowly kill them off.

As to matching prices with them, I don't agree with you at all.

Let them sell cheaper, even if the cost is lower, it will cost them more at the end of the day.

As long as your service etc is better and the customers can see this, you will continue to sell anyway.  Cheapest is not necessarily the best deal.

Though of course it will depend on exactly what it is you are selling.  If it's the kind of thing that you can buy anywhere, then cheapest will win.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

"Keyword advertising isn't cheap, but a card transaction fee is around 1.9% +20p, which leaves a lot of wriggle room to pay for ads to get the site established."

But only if you are actually making the sales!

And it either takes a fair bit of money to get to that point, or an awful lot of word of mouth.

Yes, if you can sell from your own website it is worth it.  But to get to that point, IS expensive.  Which is the point that I was making.
I would imagine that to get established, on average, probably takes at least 6 - 12 months.
That's a long time to be hitting ads.  And you do have to have pretty good margins for that to work.

Ebay, Amazon and so on, have a ready made customer base for you, which costs nothing to tap into initially.

[superchallenge]

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@therenewalworkshopltd wrote:

I don't disagree with that at all.

But if you are seeing sellers like that, are you not reporting them?

---

The problem is that reporting them does nothing. I was doing some research on my item titles yesterday, and an item showed up which has the a placeholder "Item Pictures and Details to Follow" image. Which is about standard for a Saturday. The place is beseiged with these listings every week, just as soon as eBay issues the frequent 80% off (or in this case, 100% off) promo to private sellers.

The user is registered as a Private Seller. Click through to their other items, and they've got 1 live item and 99 of these placeholder listings. All in my main category. In one case, my listing from my Top Seller Plus-rated account with eBay Premium Service, with free returns, with no defects, with perfect feedback, with a good item description, good photos, and correctly filled out item specifics was appearing BELOW a placeholder listing from a seller with less than 10 feedback in a "Best Match" search.

Then you find the other four accounts who all have the exact same placeholder image and item titles and are quite clearly from the same person, who is using multiple accounts.

Report them and within 10 minutes, you get an auto-response from eBay saying that their system has looked at the seller or the listing and can find no problem. Every single time.

They could have 10,000 listings as a private seller and eBay wouldn't find a problem with it.

[rainbowtrax]

And that is par for the course. I could name "private" sellers with over 30,000 listings, "private" sellers with 5 or more illegally trading accounts who were first reported well over a decade ago, both advertising the fact that they're businesses but ebay still see "no problem". Reporting is completely pointless. New HMRC reporting legislation won't make any difference either as they're only concerned with collecting tax, not what type of account a seller trades from.

[btr.style]

eBay don't act on those reports. Many people mention here about reporting people like this for years and eBay have never acted. The community team here say keep reporting them as reports are taken seriously but they never are. There's members here who say they've reported the same sellers for years and nothing has been done. 

Why shouldn't prices be matched? I've been in business long enough to see what happens. As I mentioned, our listings are better presented, have the nice logo, returns fully accepted. Their accounts are with no returns accepted, some generic made up username (it's not this as I'm not naming and shaming anyone but imagine something like user2468), a pittance of a description with spelling mistakes, errors in grammar and just 2 lines. 

In clothing, with seasonal releases, something which is in demand one season, might not be in demand the next. One coat type that was popular one autumn/winter with a going rate of around £130 could well be not as desirable the following year and the going rate then changes and it will barely fetch £100 the following year. 

It happens in clothing. We had one type of wax coat that was stocked in 2021. During that season the sale rate was around £130. Being repeatedly undercut by these private business sellers lowered that going rate to around £115-£120 and they cleared all theirs. The season ended, we packed ours away. The following Autumn they were listed again with barely any interest. The price had to keep being lowered and the general selling point is down to £95. Spring 2024 (almost) and we still have some of them left to pack away again until September, having sold 2 this season. 

We missed out on the sales when that coat was in demand because private account business sellers were able to constantly undercut us thanks to eBay's fee promo. They made the sales based on having the lower price. Now we have to store them away each year and waste time and resources creating a new listing for them every year to sell them at a lower price than they were worth a few years ago. 

[rainbowtrax]

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@btr.style wrote:

eBay don't act on those reports. Many people mention here about reporting people like this for years and eBay have never acted. The community team here say keep reporting them as reports are taken seriously but they never are. There's members here who say they've reported the same sellers for years and nothing has been done. 

---

Exactly that. I've been here years and I can't recall a single reported case ever of a "private" seller being forced to switch to a business account following a report from another user. There was one illegal trader who used to post on the boards many years ago who was particularly vile to other users in their posts. Because of this, their illegal trading was reported at that time by multiple different users. This was over a decade ago. They're still illegally trading now with thousands of listings.

As for ebay's claim that they have systems in place to detect illegal trading, that's completely untrue as no one, not even ebay, could design a detection system so inept that a "private" seller with over 30,000 listings doesn't trigger an account review.

[sagr2519]

Where are the details for this offer? Or do you mean the usual "free listings" where we still need to pay fixed and variable fees when the item sells? If you know of an offer you must have some evidence.

edit: oh https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Seller-Central/Inviataion-only-free-listings-until-15th-April/td-p/7...

[primeshooter3]

Might not offer returns as a matter of course (because it discourages indesive people out to take me for a ride) but it is overriden by ebay if someone really wants to do it anyway. So really, you can click no returns but you will still be forced anyway - so what's the issue?

[primeshooter3]

NB the obsession is money. Ebay is a business. The backbone of ebay is and always has been private sellers. I've been here for two decades, and I can tell you this is no my first rodeo. They want people to sell here. Even crazy good offers like no fees, instils confidence in the brand and brings folk back. Then they can slip in some fees down the line and make money out of them.

[british-ceramics-and-paintings]

"The backbone of ebay is and always has been private sellers"

Could you tell me the breakdown between the revenue private sellers generate for Ebay compared with business sellers ?

[sagr2519]

Does eBay publish statistics like which proportion of new customers (first purchase) buy from a private seller, and how many of those go on to buy from businesses?

[the_book_seekers]

Not that I've seen. As with any business ebay won't publish anything it doesn't have to unless it suits them to do so.

[unky_paul]

What a rip off !  The people with big sales who earn eBay a lot of money get ignored. How is that fair ?

It's the same old story, new customers get better deals to get them on board and the loyal customers are ignored

[ti5sue]

The big bear is charged on postage 

America doesn't have that and also post local for free if it's in the same state