How many sellers are closing their shops or running down their account in 2024?

[ovleisure]

We have been a seller on here over a couple of our accounts for many years now.   Over this time we have seen a reduction in sales from a max of £13k pcm to £60 pcm.    We have been through mass seller culls, more and more control over the seller/buyer relationship, the forcing of managed payments, increases in fees and requirements to use promoted/advanced promoted and now bid for clicks, to the point where ebay is taking an unsustainable percentage of profit.  

This in turn has lead to such search manipulation as to be virtually impossible for any of our listings to be shown unless we implemented all of the additional promotions, and even then since everyone is in the same boat, it makes little difference.   Search has been broken as a result of all this, and whereas in the past, if your product met the search terms, you could get your item to show, this is now not much short of a miracle!

Maybe you could argue some of it is the economy, but when your listings barely get any visibility unless you pay through the nose for it, it becomes a weak argument at best.

We have closed our shop and have halved our listings, and will be running down all of the stock we do have via other marketplaces.  

I'm just curious what other peoples plans are in 2024, are you bearing with ebay in the hopes of better times, or moving on?

[therenewalworkshopltd]

Yes, I understand that.

But what your not getting, is that they wouldn't be sold at the same price, BECAUSE the fees are higher.

Which is why on the face of it, an item sold at the same price, will appear more expensive when it's a private seller.

But in reality, this will never happen, because it's more expensive to sell as a business.

A real private seller, will sell an item for whatever it is that they want returned.

Which will in most cases be quite a bit cheaper than any business seller, regardless of the BPF.

Simply because said seller, does not have to account for the cost of the item.

They only care about how much they get in their pocket.

So even if the fees where exactly the same, the private seller will invariably undercut.

The issue is highlighted when you have a business, pretending to be private seller and because the fees are less, can still sell cheaper than a properly registered business.

[the-layer-laboratory]

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@nuggett46 wrote:
Sorry, but you are not getting what I am trying to say. I'm looking at it purely from a Buyers perspective, on what the BUYER sees when look
at their 2 listing. One at £10 and one at £11.12. for the same item! I would say the £10 gets bought, granted that the business seller would make a smaller return.
Sent from Outlook for Android<>

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In your example, the private seller's listing is more expensive because they are trying to make more profit than the business seller for the same item. If they aim for the same profit, their listing would be cheaper than the business seller's listing.

So.... other than greed wanting to make more than the market value, what is the reason that the private seller can't reduce their price a little to make their listing more competitive?