My view on all of this ,is that as a private myself the new buyer protection fee and everything else shouldn't or won't really make much of a difference to me .... will it?.
I wasn't too bothered last year when Ebay announced that they were going to stop releasing payments immediately into my bank account and instead i'd have manually claim it or they would auto pay it every 3 months,i simply let them hold onto it and then they auto paid it to me, in effect , nothing changed for me, i'm selling my redundant posessions and its not like i need the funds for business cash flow purposes.
I would have preferred Ebay to have levied the new buyer protection fee onto me and i could have easily adapted my listings to take care of this without impacting the buyer experience, after all i had already become accustomed to paying seller fees until the end of last year. as for as the original poster telling us that it prevents them from selling competitively then my thoughts are as follows. This fee will apply to all private sellers and this creates a level playing field in this respect and thus no private seller is at any disadvantage to any other. Now ..... whether your items eventually sell will be determined by a number of factors and d'you understand that price is not always the over riding one , in fact i have many buyers express the view via messages post sale that they are avoiding the big business sellers (in the category that i am selling in) as they do not offer adequate quality and packaging when shipping , so they instead buy from me.
Mentioning the removal of multi item listings for private sellers is interesting as seldom does a private seller hold enough items to ever really need this facility, and i would argue that perhaps that this is more suited to being a business seller tool?
