Subscription or Fees

[trade-price-stamps-2015]

I can understand the fee structure for selling items, You sell an item, pay fees for selling that item and hopefully make some profit.

But £525 for an anchor store subscription? What is that money for and where do they think it comes from, out of the profits from the sold items that we have paid fees for selling ?!?!?!

A fairer way to go, is fees for the sold items, Pay as you go.

[nigel_paul_wright7557]

With a shop you get a lot of of free listings.

So to make it work you need to sell lots of things.

[trade-price-stamps-2015]

Yes, that does seem to be the case and then you will need a lot of promotions, for the lots of items to be seen so they can sell.

[robbtyke132010]

The fees for the Anchor Shop seem steep - eBay needs to go half-way house. Perhaps £200 shop fee for 5000 free listings a month. Might get some takers.

[jonatjonatjonat]

Indeed we are on the medium tier shop at £77 which gives you 1,500 listings.

i think we calculated the point at which it becomes financially beneficial to jump to the anchor shop was about 7,000 listings.

[the_book_seekers]

With a shop you get a lot of of free listings.

Why is there this idea that having a shop means free listings, that's an ebay myth. We pay our subscriptions to get an allocation of listings that work out cheaper than paying individually. I don't call that free.

[trade-price-stamps-2015]

You need to sell a lot of low price items to make it pay and so you need a big inventory but a big inventory means anchor shop which is very expensive so vicious circle. its driving away small business users.

[eddie10_10]

Until June 2024 I had been a seller with an Anchor store. I shut it down in June because of issues within the business outside my control & I came back to ebay in August as a featured shop.

I agree with trade-price -stamps that in an ideal world there should be no shop fee or a very low one like the Amazon model £30 a month for as many as you want, however it has to be items already in the catalogue that you can piggy-back on or you need to buy SKUs from GS1

Yes the final fees are higher but so long as I make a profit I would much rather pay a higher final fee when an item does sell whilst being safe in the knowledge that it is not costing me anything until it does sell.

Shop subscriptions:

Basic £27

Featured £77

Anchor £437

All plus VAT

Basic to Featured a £50 jump but livable. The killer is the gap between Featured & Anchor of £360

Yes you get unlimited listings which is all well & good if sales on the platform are strong, but as you will see in another post I made earlier today. Sales Saturday 2nd November 2024 (Yes November!) from 2723 listings not a single sale!

In the US they have four shop subscriptions & the financial step up between each level is far better.

I have discussed with ebay concierge many times about introducing another shop level that sits between featured & Anchor, let's say £200 a month for 10,000 listings.

This would encourage featured shop sellers to upgrade & eventually take an Anchor store but right now the gap is too big for many sellers to risk.

Ebay agents keep talking about insight meetings & how my suggestion is a great idea, however it's never acted upon!

[rjwilmsi]

Business sellers without a shop pay 30p + VAT per listing as the listing fee. So it is cheaper to pay the shop fee than the listing fees once you have enough listings. That is even if the seller won't/can't use any of the other (less valuable) features of the shop.

I agree that even with a shop listing fees are not "free", but they are cheaper.

[trade-price-stamps-2015]

This all makes perfect sense to me, other levels of subs proberly would not help me but i can see this would benefit a lot of small business and be good for thriving Ebay community.

I would prefer to get rid of the subscriptions and only pay when items sell.

[crg_music]

Speaking personally when a site like discogs allows unlimited listings with a fee only on sale Ebay cant ever compete on music. I'd suspect there are similar sites for games etc also. The only way I see Ebay being viable in the long term is to do away with listing fees fullstop. Most businesses would have no issues with paying a fee on sales but actively limiting how much stock a seller can list seems counterproductive.

[trade-price-stamps-2015]

Yes, all of us and Ebay are in business to sell and people love to shop and buy so why is it all so complicated.

[wyntersemporium]

Consider sellers in the USA get their shops cheaper 

10,000 free listings for second tier store which in the UK has 1000 free listings anything over that you have to pay for