The new conditions for sellers to get paid only after two (or three days) after the item is delivered is yet another example of Corporation poor planning driven by the account executives in the company who understand figures but have no ideas when it comes to good business practice. By the way how many have had these terms applied well in advance of February 4th? Mine came into effect almost as soon as it was announced and when I asked an agent they said they were phasing these changes in with immediate effect.
Make no mistake the new terms are driven by financial gain , no matter how much this will be pushed as part of the "protection of buyers" program. It allows now eBay to amass a huge amount of money in their client's accounts which (like the banks) they play with on the international money markets. Overnight I have gone from being paid one or two days, after the customer pays eBay, to now potentially having to wait 6 weeks or longer for payments. I sell more than 70% of my items to buyers overseas (mainly in the USA and China). I use the eBay global shipping program to send the items but as an example an item for France from the UK (which if I had done the postage myself could be delivered in 5 days) has taken over two weeks and still not arrived at the client. I stuck with Global shipping because it used to be a way to be paid quickly. Now it is the exact opposite.
What has this done as an immediate effect for me? Overnight my cashflow has crashed. The direct knock on effect of this is I am accepting bids way below what I want if the buyer is in my country in an attempt to gain some money back as the wait is likely to be 1 week not 6 or more weeks. Secondly I am sending everything out 24 hour delivery to gain a day or so on the far end. Both of these measures are creating on my total income an additional loss of around 5%
Furthermore since the role out of the initial new terms for private sellers in October 2024 I have found that unless you promote an item (which is costing again around another 12% on the selling costs) you will have limited chance of selling the items. This was not the case before the new terms.
I was, when I was paid quickly, reinvesting a fair percentage of the money almost immediately in to new stock with the aim of driving up more sales. This I cannot do now as I have well into a 4 figure sum now sitting on the account which I cannot access. This is in just a little over one week since the new terms have been applied to me.
This could have been done in so many different ways. I would not have complained if eBay came clean , said we are not creating enough revenue so we need to add a surcharge of 2 or 3 % on all sales. They would, by doing this, lose less customers and actually I am guessing gain far more money by being open, honest and upfront to their sellers. I would be better off, retaining my cash flow and direct reward for every item sold, and it costing me less in real terms.
This is not a community eBay. You do not build that with cliched phrases telling us all how much you care for us as clients but actually doing the exact opposite. We are, whether we want to admit it or not, heavily invested in eBay if you are a regular buyer or seller (or both). If we felt far less like a commodity to you, believe me, the results financially for eBay would be far greater as we only want in reality the success of eBay and the more motivation the more we would work hard to grow our selling platform year on year.
I have heard from numerous sellers on eBay that they are looking for alternatives . This quick cash grab at the direct disadvantage to your sellers can only lead to a lessening of your long term income.
