@vinylscot wrote:
I do think it's more likely that eBay simply wasn't ready to implement the buyers' fee across the board. It would have been a huge undertaking.
If it had been a change of heart/policy, it would have been dealt with better, even by eBay, and they would have tried to milk it for some credit, and there has been no such fanfare.
Giving less than 12 hours notice suggests simple incompetence, rather than a change of tack.
@vinylscot normally I would also be on the side of incompetence but this time, I honestly think it's more than that.
I happen to follow the stock and earnings news for eBay very closely, including direct personal conversations with several market analysts who cover eBay - and to say everyone is on pins and needles about how buyer fees are going to work out would be an understatement.
You may or may not be aware, but here in the US, Mercari and Poshmark both tried to switch to a buyer fee model last year with absolutely disastrous results in terms of buyer reaction and falling sales.
Poshmark received so much backlash, they reverted back to their old fee structure in less than 2 weeks.
Mercari blundered through almost 9 months of hemorrhaging buyers and sales before changing their fee structure again in December to a hybrid model where sellers pay commission and buyers pay a smaller "protection" fee and by all indications, the damage to their business may well be irreparable at this point.
Investors and analysts are well aware of how badly this has gone for other companies and the only thing eBay has really offered to calm their nerves is to say they believe the UK market is just different from the US and that UK buyers will be more tolerant of paying the fees, citing Vinted and Depop (but mostly Vinted) as examples, so it won't be a problem.
But just because eBay says something doesn't mean it's true, nor does it mean that it will assuage investor concerns....and in fact at least two analysts I'm aware of have recently downgraded eBay stock to a sell citing concerns about all of these changes in the UK, lower revenue, increasing fees in the US, and eBay increasingly having to try to squeeze more money out of Promoted Listings because they seem incapable of figuring out how to actually organically bring in more buyers and/or increase sales on the platform.
So there is a lot more riding on this Buyer Fee thing than it might appear at first glance and that's why I am actually learning toward the sudden change to a phased rollout being more about risk management and mitigation than any technical or competency limitations.
