free postage for private sellers - how often ?

[kes-3020]

recently ebay gave free postage to private sellers at the time of black friday for a month, & also christmas for 2 weeks, do ebay do this regularly , if so at what periods of the year ? i have only joined a few months ago, so didnt know about the free postage for private sellers until it happened. ebay paid the postage for private sellers for a while, in case you didnt know about this.

[jonatjonatjonat]

I’ve never heard of the offer.

as it stands if using Simple Delivery as a private seller then there are two options

set the postage as buyer pays (so consequently the seller doesn’t pay)

set free delivery and this will mean the label is charged to the seller. Is this what eBay are stating they are covering??

[sml192]

It is a new promotion for new and returning Private Sellers using Simple Delivery, whereby eBay covers the costs of postage for items £10 or less, which to my knowledge eBay first ran in November and then repeated in December (Details of the December offer below). 

Whether it will be repeated again or extended to other Private Sellers (doubtful) is unknown.  It will depend on how successful it has been and how costly it is to run.

https://pages.ebay.co.uk/free-delivery-selling-promo-under-10/?mkevt=1&mkpid=2&emsid=e90001.mmslibPa...

[kyanyama]

Not heard of it - but then there are a lot of messages from eBay - so I may have missed it!  I use Free Postage which should be called 'Inclusive Postage' as it's not free!  But am a regular and not a returning member.

But then it's not worth selling my stuff under a tenner with inclusive postage as I now have to pay the buyer protection fee as well.

[kes-3020]

yes, this is it, the items had to be less than £10, i joined in september, the 2 you mentioned are the only ones i heard of, but i just joined a couple of months ago.

i thought it was more to do with big selling / buying periods, because when i looked back they were around the time of black friday & christmas.

but since you said it was because of new private sellers etc then maybe its because of that, but it didnt start with me when i joined, it started later.

the reason im asking is because it was enormously beneficial, i was able to sell low value things that i would not normally be able to sell. if i had to add the postage then it would have literally doubled the price, & i would not have been able to sell them.

so i was wondering if they were regular things so i could prepare for them ?

[jckl1957 · Accepted solution]

I think the responses to your post show this has not  previously been a regular thing.

I spend too much time in this forum and yours is the only post I have ever seen which mentioned Ebay giving private sellers free postage.  So, as far as I am aware, it is not something that has happened before.

However, that doesn't mean it won't happen again.

Two things to take on board though.

As you become established as a seller, you might not qualify for such an offer anyway.

There is no guarantee that Ebay will ever make anybody such an offer again.

You may have to decide if you want to sell your items for a bit less or simply hang onto them.