Time for a Level Playing Field...

[collectablecats]

Let's call a spade a spade. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of 'private' sellers  on ebay who are trading. And the number of their listings is ballooning as they get rolled over for free every month.

I often check other listings before deciding whether to list a card I have, and its not unusual to discover 'private' sellers with many thousands, even tens of thousands of sales, and hundreds or thousands of free listings that roll over for free every month, meaning their 'shops' get bigger and bigger, slowly making business listings harder to find. Just yesterday I discovered a 'private' seller in my category with 26,000 sales and 2000+ listings - all sitting there free of change and paying no commission when they sell.

There is no way to address this effectively without LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD  and giving all sellers the same deal when listing and paying commission. This is what happens in the USA an in Australia, where you also get a huge number of 'free' listings when you pay for a shop compared to here in the UK.

Sure, give private sellers 20 or 30 free listings a month - who, listing things they want to get rid of, would honestly need more -  but include the monthly roll-overs in that total so they have to decide whether to keep those items running, just like businesses do.  And charge them commission on sales. 

Ebsy likes to call itslef a 'community' - but when the community leaders make businesses pay through the nose to allow their competitors to have everything free, it doesn't feel like a community for many legitimate businesses on here. Especially when they are then invited to pay even more to 'promote' items, so they have a better chance of being seen among the vast sea of 'private' listings they have been subsidising.

One hopes eBay will one day place 'community' values at the heart of their 'community' and treat businesses fairly by reintroducing a level playing field. 

[the_brick_lodge]

I've seen some with 10,000+ listings, seems unlikely they'd pay between £1500-£2000 a month for those listings, even with a shop it's only 400 a month, if capped yearly at 4800 an extra 5200 listings at 35p a go is £1820 a month, I was always under the impression it's unlimited roll overs? 

[charmkeyrings]

I've been on ebay for 8 years.   I sell keyrings.  I sold a keyring the other day for £4.95  and ended up with 84p.  We're getting rinsed.  Either put up with it or move on.  There are many other platforms and opportunities these days and AI has made it much easier.  I strongly suggest using AI to find good matches for your services / products.  All the best.

[fribblecollectables]

The 3,600 figure only really makes sense if you are looking at one year’s worth of new free listings. It does not necessarily mean a private seller can only ever have 3,600 live listings.

If a private seller can create 300 free listings each month, and the unsold fixed-price listings keep rolling over, the total can build up like this:

Month 1: list 300, none sell → 300 live
Month 2: list another 300, none sell → 600 live
Month 12: potentially 3,600 live
After 3 years: potentially 10,800 live

.

That is part of the problem. I have been casually reporting one seller with around £80,000 of brand-new stock for over two years now, every few months, partly just to see what happens — and nothing has happened.

There was also a recent example of a private seller with around £100,000 worth of watches asking why he was not getting many sales. He was strongly advised to change to a business account, but so far he has not done so.

The fee difference is not small. If that £100,000 of watches sold through a business account, Watches, Parts & Accessories are currently charged at 12.9% on the portion up to £750 per item, then 3% above that, plus eBay’s 0.35% regulatory operating fee and per-order fees. If most of those watches are under £750 each, that could be roughly £13,250 in eBay seller transaction/regulatory fees alone, before per-order fees, shop fees, promoted listings, international fees, or anything else. A private seller would not be paying those final value or regulatory operating fees on UK sales.

Whether 10,000 live listings still looks genuinely “private” is a separate issue, especially if the stock is being bought in, replenished, or run at trading scale. But the financial incentive for staying private is obvious.

[theelench]

It might be well to remember that ebay was once a level playing field with both private and business sellers paying Insertion Fees and Final Value Fees and that that situation continued as ebay reached its most successful years around 2008 - '15 (?).

With such success why did ebay move away from what was a winning formula?  Back then private sellers were possibly still in the majority and I'd guess that one reason was the sheer inefficiency of collecting tens of billions of 5 and 10 pences from all the listings every month, or as auctions were more prevalent, every week and billing sellers each month for their fees.

Ebay progressively raised FVF to (mostly) 10% and at some point where its 'take' from FVF exceeded the benefit derived from listing fees, minus the expense of collecting them, removed them and still increased its revenue.   

Looking back at the increasing numbers of businesses at the time, the equation would have been different.  Businesses were growing, on the back of ebay's circular economy of private sellers using their sales to pay for purchases.  Doesn't it then become a question of scale ?  Collecting thousands of listing fees once a month from one business is more cost effective than collecting the same fees from thousands of private sellers with one or two listings each.  As business numbers have ballooned it remains so.

That, simply put, is why the two tier fee structure began IMO and remains to this day.

Free listings were only ever an inducement to get existing private sellers to list more and as their numbers declined, to entice new private sellers to the site.   They were increased in direct response to the falling numbers and its effect on the circular economy.   That then created the problem of businesses pretending to be private sellers because of the fee disparity between the registered and the unregistered. 

Business sellers usually see 'levelling the playing field' as putting restrictions on private sellers, restricting what they can sell, their listing numbers, their free listings and whether or not they should roll over.  That idea flies in the face of ebay's goal of increasing their numbers and how much they list.  So IMO it is a non-starter.

Ebay.uk and its private sellers are in the middle of ebay's experiment of "Free to Sell" with revenue from fees being replaced by fees from buyers and profits from Managed Delivery.

What if, when it finally gets them accepted and to work properly, ebay does intend to level the playing field without restricting the private sellers it wants to encourage.

By removing fees from businesses and making them accept BPF and MD (perhaps rolled out as their own delivery contracts end ?), any advantage unregistered businesses have would disappear.  I'm sure that ebay is adept enough at juggling its figures to sell the move as a win for all sellers, except unregistered businesses and probably have enough left over to report an increase in its % take from each transaction into the bargain ??   

[krafty-kreations]

What if, when it finally gets them accepted and to work properly, ebay does intend to level the playing field without restricting the private sellers it wants to encourage.

Or they could just enforce their own terms and conditions and stop allowing business sellers to sell on private accounts. My opinion is they don't care now, they won't care if and when they get things working properly.

All this has encouraged is more business sellers to shut up shop and sell on private accounts, how many more experiments will they bring out that will have a negative effect on genuine private sellers to try and recoup the fees they are losing? 

I personally do not care how many free listings a genuine private seller has or if they roll over, I care that I am constantly being undercut by sellers who have thousands of listings, some well over the limit of  an anchor shop that I would have to pay over £500 a month for not to mention all the other fees these sellers do not have to pay.

How many businesses can afford to sit and wait for eBay to do the right thing? 

[jlovie]

A private seller with a shop gets 400 listings per month, and those can roll over free so that ups the numbers.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

A private seller gets 300 listings per month, not 400.

There is cap on this, but I cannot find it now and I don't have the time to go digging any further.

Sorry missed that you added shop in there.
Yes, with that   they can have the extra, but they are paying for those via the shop fee.

[technthread]

A private seller can pay £19.99 for an extra 100 listings to top it up to 400. And what is it, 35p per listing over that limit per month or something like that. 

If I had a collection to sell off on my private account I’d be happy with 300 and just compound it every month. I wonder how many private sellers fork out the extra £19.99, it hardly seems worth it. 

[fribblecollectables]

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@technthread wrote:

"I wonder how many private sellers fork out the extra £19.99, it hardly seems worth it. "

I think I can guess which 'private' sellers this would be OK for.

'Private' business sellers. Like one I saw a while ago, that along with many, many hundreds of items was selling pallets of mineral water  which they obviously have knocking around in the small drawer under the bed.

But as you said, not even worth it if you are trying to get rid of things like postcards you have inherited (like I have). But who has the time to make 400 new listings each month !

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[theelench]

Ebay has always had the option to enforce its own rules but from what we've seen over the last few years it isn't interested in doing so and its half-hearted attempt (if was any attempt at all) with BPF and MD hurt more private sellers than "private" sellers.

By removing listing and FVFs from businesses and enrolling them in the BPF and MD the fee burden is moved to the buyer, levelling the playing field and removing the "private" seller's advantage over properly registered businesses.

[jonatjonatjonat]

BPF might be feasible - but enforcing any sort of delivery, if you think it was bad for private sellers, would be hellish for businesses.

I work for, what is in hte grand scheme of things a small business on ebay - but we import orders and deal with postage via a Royal Mail API that pulls into our backend system.

A proposal to have to use ebays defined couriers? It's just not going to be workable for anyone of a reasonable size.

[ett1954]

"By removing listing and FVFs from businesses and enrolling them in the BPF and MD the fee burden is moved to the buyer, levelling the playing field and removing the "private" seller's advantage over properly registered businesses." - It's certainly clear that you are not a business seller.

How do you come to that conclusion?  It comes nowhere near removing the private" seller's advantage over properly registered businesses." At best it reduces it slightly.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

Aside from anything else, where they to roll out the BPF to business sellers, then they would have to increase the percentage charged significantly, or they would lose of money from business sellers.

BPF is still considerably less than what we pay.

[jlovie]

It's the fact that private sellers don't get charged for renewals, so can keep adding more to the total for free that isn't a level playing field.

Fees for private sellers | eBay

[rainbowtrax]

There isn't a cap of 3,600 or any other figure on the number of listings a private seller can have for free. 3,600 is just the number of new listings that a private seller can create for free over the course of a year (300 a month x 12) with unlimited rollover of existing listings. This was reduced from 1,000 a month in 2024.

What you see though is illegally trading businesses listing on private accounts, some of whom have been doing this unchallenged for twenty years, who had built up a significant number of listings when the monthly free allowance was 1000. So you have sellers with upwards of 50,000 listings at the time of the change and those listings remain. As long as they don't end and relist them at all then they all renew for free infinitely, even if there were a million of them.

The only cap on private sellers is the listing allowance applied to all newer accounts (this increases exponentially if you just list up to your limit for a couple of months) and the limit of "only" 300 new listings for free each month. Many illegally trading businesses have been doing it long enough to have built up their inventory to many times the 3,600 new freebies per year. They were already well established when this was introduced.

[sheba-knows-best]

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@rainbowtrax wrote:

As long as they don't end and relist them at all then they all renew for free infinitely, even if there were a million of them.

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Which, I suppose, is the interesting part.

As we all know (I think) that if you don't 'relist' or 'sell similar' a listing within 3 months, it becomes stagnant ie it will only be visible when a) it fits the algorithm incredibly perfectly (hard to do), or b) the buyer searches and searches and searches and the algorithm begins to reassess (from the buyers clicks) what the buyer wants after all.

WHich is why maybe vinyl sellers are in a particularly iniquitous position in this whole debacle - as its hard to argue with: Billy Joel / Innocent Man / LP - so price is always going to be a huge deciding factor (and private sellers will undercut)

[rainbowtrax]

@sheba-knows-best yes, it is an interesting aspect. I'm never sure how much these stagnant listings really suffer and I think it differs by category and type of buyer. The only buyers who will be missing out on seeing listings that ebay have declared as stagnant are those who settle for ebay's awful default settings when searching. But that may be a lot of buyers, particularly if using the app.

Many buyers looking for anything that's fairly easily available are likely to be looking for the best deal so price will be a big factor - so if they've got any sense they'll be searching by Lowest Price sort order not the hideous "Best Match" (which never is, whatever your searching priorities). But I have no idea what percentage of buyers know how to get rid of "Best Match" - again, even that knowledge will differ for different types of items and it's a real shame that it's the default sort order as it's probably the main cause of people complaining of poor search results.

I guess listings only become stagnant anyway if they're one-offs. In some categories, the illegal traders are selling commodity items that they have in multiple quantities and make steady, regular sales so their listings wouldn't even become stagnant unless sales completely dried up for three months.

[rainbowtrax]

One example of an illegal trader (not in my categories - I'm only aware of them because they have been mentioned multiple times on the boards) has been doing it for 9 years and currently has just under 19,000  brand new multi-quantity items listed. But each item also has 5 variations available. So they actually have just under 95,000 different items listed and don't pay a penny in fees. I know they've been reported because posters have said so but ebay obviously found no reason to believe they were trading as they're still a "private" seller.

[spence0175]

It’s become a mockery to the people doing the right thing. In the category I mostly sell in, the business seller has virtually disappeared to be replaced by their “private” seller self..

I am feeling very disillusioned with the whole set up

[5216elisabeth]

Seasonal listings e.g Christmas can go stagnant during the summer but often come out of hibernation as people start searching for them. Likewise with camping items during the winter. In my experience anyway. Particularly with items which don't have too much competition. They are not actually hidden either as I have sold Christmas items on here every month of the year in the past, albeit not many. Likewise I have sold camping items in December, for example. In many cases these had been left running from their original season as I had spare listing capacity.