DROP IN SALES SINCE NEW BUYER PROTECTION 4TH FEB 2025

[lo.maggi]

Has anyone else noticed lack of sales since the buyer protection update 4th february 2025. I used to sell quite a lot and virtually sold nothing since 4th Feb. Can anyone else relate to this and what can we do?

[rabwendy]

EBay has never attacked the buyer before they have now.all the people on here are saying the same thing.the sales have completely dropped off since the 4th of February we all can’t be wrong.

[twbc123]

My daughter said the exact same thing a few weeks ago.

It took them a little while to get popular but hats off to Vinted for staying with it. Ebays been asking for it for a long time.

[mydeafdog]

If Ebay cannot wipe out Vinted, they will just buy them out - as they did with Gumtree.

[rabwendy]

I have already said this a few days ago if a private seller drops his price to counteract the buyers fee the buyer still has a buyer’s fee to pay so the seller can’t win


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[twbc123]

I think the fee must vary because I won an old cine camera the other day for £322.79 and with £25 postage should be under £350. However, when I went to pay, the bill came out to £402.09. I had the cancel the order. I’m not fooling for that again.

[*devils.advocate*]

Look, I paid fees of 13%+ before.

Did most private sellers reduce their price?

No.

i don't want to pay for both prior fees and new fees.

Who is at fault for that?

Private sellers who didn't pass on their savings of having "free to sell".

And if they had reduced their prices, they'd be more competitive than before and I'd be paying less fees.

Do the sums.

[jma2815]

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@rabwendy wrote:
I have already said this a few days ago if a private seller drops his price to counteract the buyers fee the buyer still has a buyer’s fee to pay so the seller can’t win


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Exactly. The problem with the buyer fee is almost purely psychological. Lowering your price to ‘absorb the fee’, especially on a collectible or vintage item where comparison isn’t possible won’t be visible to the buyer and the problem remains. 

[alexis*27]

You need to advertise that you will partially refund the buyer on purchase the same cost as the protection fee. Only way to do it really.

[wellingnorth]

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@jma2815 wrote:

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@rabwendy wrote:
I have already said this a few days ago if a private seller drops his price to counteract the buyers fee the buyer still has a buyer’s fee to pay so the seller can’t win

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Exactly. The problem with the buyer fee is almost purely psychological. Lowering your price to ‘absorb the fee’, especially on a collectible or vintage item where comparison isn’t possible won’t be visible to the buyer and the problem remains. 

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But at the moment on the search page the buyer sees (or should see) the final price including buyer fee and in fact will only realise there is a buyer fee until later on in the process?

So if on a £20 item you adjust your price to £18.53 or whatever it is the buyer should see £20 and be none the wiser?

But the issue for me is there is no straightforward way for the seller to set the price that the buyer sees - at the moment it's listing by listing and trial and error due to the rounding of the 4%.

[valleyrc1]

"How many sellers dropped their prices as that point?"

Well going by the dozens of mass panic threads that were burning up the boards at the time, all of them!

See, this is my entire point....

We had the no fees announcement and people were panicking that they would be undercut by rival private sellers, because the end of fees gave them more leeway "race to the bottom" etc

Fast forward to now, and the same kind of private sellers who insisted they would have no choice but to lower prices to remain competitive, but actually didn't, are now up in arms about this buyer protection fee.

The end of fees applied to every private seller so it was a level playing field.

The buyer protection fee also applies to all private sellers, so it's a level playing field.

But again, unless you are selling numerous new items at a fixed price and attempting to compete with business sellers................ why is a private seller worrying that an impulse buyer of their Optimus Prime figure will decide it's exactly 4% too expensive?

What are they basing that off? Have they spent their entire life tracking the price of Optimus prime figures on ebay?

Anyone who has sold on ebay for more than 5 minutes knows it's impossible to put a value on a lot of stuff because it's worth however much someone or several people are willing to pay at any given time.

At the end of the day, private sellers have 13% margin to play with if they want to worry about competing with business sellers. They will still end up better off than business sellers now, and themselves last year.

[valleyrc1]

"All the people on here" represent 0.0000001% of the ebay UK user base. You don't hear from the content majority.

You can't go a day on these boards without a new thread about slow sales, and people desperately trying to find something they can attribute it to.

Correlation does  not equal causation.

[valleyrc1]

That makes zero sense.

Buyers are only interested in the end price.


And again, if you're not a business seller with hundreds of brand new items to sell, and business sellers to compete with, your buyers shouldn't have any expectations on price to begin with, because the same used item can sell for £10 or £200 from one week to the next.

[rabwendy]

Hi you have totally missed the point of the buyers fee impact we have no sales or offers so we have 0% to play with never mind the 13% your taking about


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[alexis*27]

The fact your response is so long and complicated demonstrates the issue in a nutshell.

People want to go on eBay, find what they want at the cheapest price, buy and be done

OR

they want to bid on an item and try a get a bargain.

Now they have to pay attention to whether it's a business or an individual and whether they may or may not have to pay an add on charge they didn't have to pay last month.

[mydeafdog]

I wonder how much Ebay spend on having their supporters replying on the forums?

[lucy_farmer]

'It now means that private sellers are more expensive for the same items than business sellers.'

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Yeah but... private sellers shouldn't be selling the same items as business sellers!

Business sellers should be selling loads of brand new stuff.

Private sellers are *supposedly* selling  the unwanted stuff out of their wardrobes, lofts, garages, garden sheds, toolboxes, sewing kits etc... which tends to be second hand. Or sometimes 'new', but certainly not new multiples of...

[twbc123]

I think most people thought eBay were being nice when advertising openly on the TV about Free to sell, so naturally didn’t see a need to reduce their prices and like me advertise what they think an item is worth rather that increase it to make a profit.

eBay then used the small print method to rip it all back again and people only started noticing like me when the asking prices all starting looking odd.

eBay bombard users with junk mail that like me most people don’t read, so you only really know about the changes when it actually happens.

All I know is that now I know about the sneaky add on fee, I’m not likely to buy anything from private sellers anymore unless the seller is willing to reduce the price by the difference. As a buyer, I am NOT going to line Ebays pockets for the privilege of buying something.

[*devils.advocate*]

..... Now they have to pay attention to whether it's a business or an individual .....

Buyers don't - they look at the price of the item to see if it's worth it - nothing else.

Only sellers look at that as a seller and not as a buyer would look at it.

[rabwendy]

I have sold snap on tools for years and it’s been steadily but since the introduction of this fee everything stopped.its not just a coincidence.


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[valleyrc1]

There is absolutely zero evidence that a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of vocal users having slow sales is in any way caused by the buyer protection fee.

There's always a small percentage of people experiencing slow sales at any given time, and they are all disproportionately vocal, making dozens of threads on here and desperately looking for something to attribute it to.

You can't go 24 hours on here without a new post about slow sales. I've seen people try and attribute to to anything from changing the style of the website to REMOVING seller fees and everything in between.

It's a slow time of year for many sellers, and you'll see many business sellers complaining of slow sales and low impressions, too.

There's always the possibility that the current number of people reporting slow sales on here is no greater or less than any other time, and that the buyer protection fee is the latest straw to grab.