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I received a message from eBay today titled “Important Seller Update inside”. It says they are providing me with a “limited early seller update” in advance of the upcoming Spring Seller Update.
When I click on the link in the message, I get an error page “We Looked Everywhere! Looks like this page is missing.”
I guess that’s why it’s “limited”….?? So funny.
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Apparently, it’s not the actual Spring Seller Update. That’s scheduled for April. It’s a “Limited Preview” of the Seller Update. eBay posted to the Selling Board that they will post there when the non-working link becomes active.
For a self described Tech Company, it’s really amazing how many times they can’t get even the simplest things right. Amazing, and a little scary.
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Here’s a link to some info about the update with the main change being that all fixed-price listings will now become Good till Cancelled listings: https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2019/2/1551194482.html
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Here’s the link: https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/seller-updates/2019-early/index.html
What you need to know:
Send offers to buyers with new feature
Edit active listings directly in Seller Hub
Download the Orders Report directly in Seller Hub
Listing duration for all fixed price listings will be Good ‘Til Cancelled
Provide item specifics to list items without the eBay catalog
Automatic updates of “New other” condition listings
Terapeak subscription is now available on eBay
State sales tax requirement update-
I see this as one of the best and least invasive updates in a long time.
1. Send offers to buyers with new feature
–We’ve all had time to try this out. Nice feature, but not a big deal IMHO.2. Edit active listings directly in Seller Hub
–I liked this feature on Amazon where you could adjust the price without having to click through to the item. Cool.3. Download the Orders Report directly in Seller Hub
–Not sure it’ll be helpful to us.4. Listing duration for all fixed price listings will be Good ‘Til Cancelled
–I’m glad eBay is getting rid of the different ways to list fixed price. Hopefully it’ll get rid of the conspiracy that you need to end listings regularly to “fool” eBay. It’s all about price and quality.5. Provide item specifics to list items without the eBay catalog
–??6. Automatic updates of “New other” condition listings
–??7. Terapeak subscription is now available on eBay
–So this means that we get access to all the historical sold data on eBay? If true, this is very cool. Huge.8. State sales tax requirement update
–We knew this was happening. Again, good for eBay. They’re handling collecting and remitting all the different taxes and sellers dont have to do anything. Cool-
2. Edit active listings directly in Seller Hub
–I liked this feature on Amazon where you could adjust the price without having to click through to the item. Cool.The irritating thing is that this used to be possible and they took it away! Every time I work on condensing totes in my storage it bothers me I can’t adjust prices and quantity on the fly. This will be nice to have back.
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I’ve been able to edit three columns in Seller Hub for a month or two now. I didn’t realize that not everyone had it.
I can edit Custom Label, Price, and Quantity. I’ve used it a few times, and it works fine. You have to type in a completely new number and not edit what is there. So, if you have one of those location codes you put into the custom label column, and you need to change only part of it, you will have to type in the whole code new. You still can see what is there already as you are typing.
On a different subject (and something not covered in this preliminary seller update), I was able to print a FedEx label to my Dymo yesterday! I was using the new shipping interface (which I only use when I have one thing to ship), and the FedEx label came up vertical for a label printer rather than horizontal for printing on half an 8×10 sheet of paper.
This is great for me as I have to clean the printer heads quite often on my ink jet. I’ve dragged 2 or 3 packages to FedEx only for them to say that they couldn’t scan my label. I’ve had to drive all the way home (about 15 minutes) and come back with a new one.
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As a tender of the garden, I’m not at all happy about the mandatory GTC. My take on the impetus? They want to keep the promoted listings fee. If the clicks are GTC, Ebay makes more money.
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I dont understand. Whats the difference between listing 30 days vs GTC?
Its the same exact fee. The only difference is that the seller has to remember to manually re-list.
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As far as Promoted Listings go, unless you track and cancel the campaigns, the PL will be attached to the listing forever. With the 30 days relists, the PL campaign ends when the listing does. If I list as new (sell similar), the PL campaign doesn’t automatically follow. I like to pick and choose the timing of my Promoted Listings. I often don’t promote during the first 30 days or if things are off-season.
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I don’t presume to answer for Terri, but as a tender myself I like to review my listings when they come up for renewal. I have found typos, wrong item specifics, outdated shipping options, and descriptions that need freshening. With a store of your size, of course this is not practical.
Maybe with this I’ll be forced to join the list it and forget it crowd. That’s probably a good thing.
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I’m not anti-update listings. I admire sellers who have the patience and attention to detail to look at the same listings on a regular basis to tweak. Ryanne and I have simply decided that this activity would burn us out. We’d rather list new items and trust that our initial gut instinct when listing will win. “Make offer” really saves us.
That being said, Amazon is also “good till cancelled”. But the system also encourages you to always be updating prices. Looks like eBay will let you scroll through your active listings and change prices quickly without having to click on each listing.
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Download the Orders Report directly in Seller Hub
I think this is good for folks who maybe walk around a warehouse / space picking orders? Or can print it off for someone? Or have the report handy? I don’t get it, but ok!GTC V. 30 Day
We will have to tend the garden during duration not at 30 day mark. It is what it is. Frankly, my 30 day relists have backfired on me a few times, by missing items to re-list.Edit Active Listings in Seller Hub
Cheers to this! I can’t wait to see what we can tweak. Right now, I go to “edit mode” to change a Custom SkU and that is it. -
I’ve found that my sales have gone up since I went solely GTC on everything more than 6 months ago. The 30 day manual fall off/relist didn’t actually work that well for my business, in hindsight. While I still do believe that Ebay favors activity in your store, the 30 day cycle way of going about it is not necessarily it.
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I was reading comments on Ebay for Business’s Facebook page last night. As usual there are some sellers flipping their lids over the changes. I’ve always been in the GTC camp so this means nothing to me. But I do wonder about those sellers who maybe list only a few items and then forget about their listing. Will it keep listing and charging the user until the end of time? If I drop dead tomorrow, will my listings relist in perpetuity until my paypal account runs out of money and the account goes into ebay collections status?
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“8. State sales tax requirement update
–We knew this was happening. Again, good for eBay. They’re handling collecting and remitting all the different taxes and sellers dont have to do anything. Cool”Agreed. I just wish they would also handle sales tax collection and payments for in-state sales. I mean, as long as they are going to the trouble of implementing everything for out of state sales, it shouldn’t be too hard to add this on. I’m guessing that the biggest block to doing this is actually the state laws – states may be adding new provisions for taxing out-of-state purchases, but haven’t updated the rules for in-state sales tax processes, so we have to continue doing it the same old way.
I’m whining about this b/c I’ve only just now gotten around to starting the process of registering with my state for collecting and remitting sales tax, and I’m not looking forward to the extra work. But probably once I’ve got the process all figured out, it won’t be such a big deal.
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The main Spring Seller Release is scheduled for late April. So, hey, we all have that too look forward to.
I’m with Jay….for me, this is a positive release, I have no problems with any of it, and like some of it. The GTC issue is the one that has people riled up. I switched to GTC last year, before the Holidays and haven’t looked back. Sellers who haven’t been using GTC….well, some of them seem to be convinced it will be impossible for them to sell on eBay with GTC.
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Jay, Yes, absolutely. They claim this release was done now, rather than April, because this stuff is ready to implement, so why wait? My guess is, it would be more accurate to say everything was to be released now, but they are behind schedule on everything else, so that stuff is going to have to wait till late April. We got lucky with this one. I expect fairly significant changes in April. Not necessarily bad changes, but significant changes. But as always, nothing to do but wait and see.
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Do yu have a sense if what other changes will be announced besides the ones we’ve discussed?
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Jay,
I wish I did have some definite insights about April. I can say this. ebay has said that there are three “themes” (or whatever they call them) for 2019: 1. Partnership. 2.Sales Velocity 3. Simple and Stable Platform
Under #1, I think we can expect changes to Seller Protection, probably around Returns and so forth. No matter what ebay does here, it probably won’t satisfy everyone, but I think there will be some benefit.
More speculative, I think we might see something around marketing, maybe better advance notice of when ebay will be running targeted ad campaigns, stuff like that (But that may just be wishful thinking.Under #2, I think we may see more and similar Seller Hub changes. For example, we will soon be able to change item price in Seller Hub. In April, if not before, I expect to see ebay “suggesting” trending prices there as well. (Like many changes, this will be more helpful for multi quantity listing sellers rather than those of us with one offs, due to the relative lack of data for our stuff.) All of this stuff is aimed at increasing Sales Velocity, which, frankly, is more important to the sellers of new stuff than to most of us—so I’m expecting most changes here to be good, but of limited usefulness to us. Which is better than detrimental to us LOL Still, I’d like to see coded coupons, and I think that might be in the offing as well.
Under #3, I think in April or mid year, ebay will make more changes to Managed Payments, including bringing PP back into the program. I also expect to see changes possibly in category structure/Item Specifics as ebay continues to try to get a handle of “structured data”.
But as always, we won’t know till they announce it. So we just wait and see.
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My guess is that there will be.
I know the GTC thing isn’t an issue to most here but, on the surface, it is to me (150-250 listings) and I think it will be looked upon as a negative for a number of other small store sellers.
My sense is that they slipped it in among all the positives with this interim update because they didn’t want to add it to the noise that may come with other changes in the Spring Update.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling….
As always, I’m sure we’ll all adapt to whatever they throw at us.
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Like Amazon, you list the item and it stays listed till you cancel. Not sure if Poshmark and other platforms cancel items after a certain time period. I’m always confused why people want items to automatically end.
To us, being forced to manual re-list feels like dull administrative work that leads to burn out. Also I can imagine it leads to missing relist times which creates forgotten, dead inventory.
–Can you remind me again why Good Till Cancelled is a negative for small sellers?
–Are you unhappy because you think that relisting boosts your search results?
–Or do you like to manual relist because it forces to you to re-asses your items? As a small seller of <250 items, seems like it'd be easy to check your items every month.-
Jay, the relisting boost isn’t a major concern for me. I know I can still tend my listings, but it’s much easier to tend when you have a few ending each day than when 200 are rolling over at one time. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t want my Promoted Listings campaigns to go on for eternity. I like to make a decision every 30 days on whether to drop the promotion for awhile and lower the price instead or adjust the promotion percentage, etc. By assigning a new item number, the prior promotion automatically ends.
I use Inkfrog and it’s pretty easy to keep track of what’s ended through their site. As far as I know, I’ve never missed a relist. I purposely hold out-of-season or holiday items aside in libraries over there, though. For instance, I give the Christmas stuff one more relist after Christmas and then I won’t launch again until November 1. Same with heavy coats and sweaters. When one of those items ends, I hold to relist until August or September. Not worth it to me to pay for a larger store to stock inventory that has a low likelihood of selling for 75% of the year. Just the way I operate.
I realize I can still manually end the GTC and tend and relist, but it’ll be a PITA to track. Maybe Inkfrog has a way to show me GTC listings that are about to renew. Have never looked into it since I’ve never done GTC. If so, that’d be a big help.
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Understood. I know that eBay has made changes that bug us because it makes us change the way we do things.
I assume Inkfrog lets you view your active items by start and end dates. I know you can on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/sh/lst/active
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Inkfrog has the tool for you:
https://www.inkfrog.com/blog/manage-your-good-til-cancelled-listings-with-inkfrog/Some sellers were taken by surprise by eBay’s recent announcement that soon all fixed-price listings will be Good ‘Til Cancelled listings.
Not to worry, though—as always, inkFrog is ready to help sellers to manage any eBay busywork they’d prefer not to handle themselves.
Today we are proud to announce the release of the new GTC Watchdog tool to all inkFrog users!
You have the ability to create rules for any and all of your listings and gain complete control over this new eBay policy from within your inkFrog account.
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So, you know that I (was) in the 30 Day camp, as I did the analysis and saw that we saw sales activity increase in the first 24 hours of a listing and in the last 24 hours of a listing. This will now go away except for the first 24 hours of a listing being sent.
Also, every 4 months we would do a deep dive as listings fell off so that we could ensure we didn’t have issues, recheck prices, etc. After we did that this time, our sales have improved, and we have a better look at the market. We saw a lot of places where eBay moved on us (changing the preferred Item Specifics, changing categories, etc.) that we missed, as well as us adapting to current market realities in some areas.
Third, we know that listings that are 60 days old without a sale are market by eBay as “stale” and dropped in search. For unique one-of-a-kind items, this isn’t an issue, but for clothing and shoes, this matters.
So for us, we adjust. With SixBit, we can look at listings to see the last time it was listed, the last time modified, etc. So we can still do this work, but we did like the boost. I’m hoping I can get SixBit to have a program to end listings with the criteria we set (like a reverse Auto Relist, it will Auto Expire). This will help give us a group of items to work on that are on the criteria we have established to reexamine.
So, we may all now be in the GTC group, but I’m still not List It and Forget It. We know that after a certain time, listings can be Listed and Forgotten…
Large inventory isn’t what we want, it is large sales. And I don’t want a batch of inventory that isn’t selling. That investment of capital could go somewhere else…
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Large inventory isn’t what we want, it is large sales. And I don’t want a batch of inventory that isn’t selling. That investment of capital could go somewhere else…
–The goal isnt to have a large inventory.
–The goal is to sell consistently.
–The strategy we use is to list as much as we can so we have as many search terms out there as possible.
–The result is that inventory grows.In the two years that you have sold full time, your inventory has more than doubled. We’re just ten years into the same process. Troy, look into my eyes. I am the ghost of xmas future :0
I think its great that people tend to their listings, but I think there’s only so much a market will move. Unless you’re selling “hot” commodity items, prices dont change that much from month to month. So sure, tend away. Just be realistic about the effect.
Buyers are not that price sensitive. You can do an experiment by putting a 20% sale on a 1000+ item store. I know of no seller that has sold more than 10-20 extra items. That’s statistically insignificant.
When you once shared your numbers of the bump you get when you relist all your items, I believe it was under 20 items extra sold. Nothing to sneeze at, but if you’re listing 100+ items a week, you’re going to list more than you can sell.
We’ve just made peace with it.
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Not sure if you follow terminal99, but he has had a 60 percent store sale happening. His normal sales have been about 750. As of right now they are 996 sold items. if you are familiar with his store from looking in the past you can see his sales have increased and he discusses the sale in recent videos.
Anyway, it came to mind after reading your post.
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–Did he sell 996 items in a week or month?
–60% sale is pretty incredible especially since he specializes in low dollar post cards. So is he selling $10 items for $4?
–Why is he doing such blow out sale?-
– if you look in the ap or sold listing you can see the 60 day history, which i am referring
– he does not do post cards, i believe that was another interview you may have done at a recent time as his interview. He is pretty similar to you guys.
– likely, he believes customers are price sensitive. I do not know the answer to why he is doing the sale, but potentially he wants to get the money to buy better stuff that will sell better. He has a lot of long tail and i imagine much if his older stuff he may not buy todayI actually thought your interview with Will was one of your better ones, which says a lot, because you guys have rolled out tones of amazing content.
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You’re correct. I forgot that Will is the one who sells random items like we do. Almost 900 items sold in two months is impressive.
You got to admit that a 60% off sale is pretty extreme. When he lowers his price to more than half, then I don’t doubt it’ll move the needle.
We average about 400 sales every two months without 60% off sales. So we sell half as much, but may make twice as much profit on each item. We’d have to see everyone exact numbers, but it seems like its just a different way to get to the same place.
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Absolutely – I am not advocating a 60% sale – and Will seems kind of pissed off at Ebay b/c his store keeps getting suspended – so who knows his motivation.
Believe me i am familiar with your store too : ) Your returns are amazing. Your business is actually really different than his in the sense that you spend much less on your inventory and imagine your returns are a lot higher. My opinion is people just are price sensitive — though i get where you are coming from — sometimes actually it seems like people will be more interested in weird items if the price is higher — so i guess it is not all black and white
But anyway back to listing as i cannot stand trying to sell things to people anymore in the real world at my day job : )
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Agreed. Buyers absolutely care about price, especially on new commodity items where all choices are the same.
But my point is this: just lowering the price wont sell an item ASAP. There is not an army of buyers wanting to hit “buy” then moment we lower the price. As frustrating as it is, sometimes no one wants our stuff. I know many sellers wish they knew what lever to pull to sell an item quickly, but it’s just about being patient and not underpricing for when the right buyer comes along.
Why is Will getting suspended?
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From what i gathered he was getting dinged for using misleading words in titles — this is not specifically what he did, but as an example, “Not Gold Ring” — Ebay does not let folks use words that may attract attention but not actually be true. It seemed like he got suspended a few times for it, then the last video i listened to, it sounded like he was suspended a entire month.
I don’t know any of the specifics other than what i picked up from a few videos – but to me it sounded like he got on someones S–T list at Ebay or something. Kind of weird.
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Its a big no-no to say things like “not gold” or “like Pendleton” or “Gucci style”. It’s keyword stuffing: https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-policies/search-browse-manipulation-policy?id=4243
Once eBay gives a warning, it’s best to stop that behavior, full stop. We’ve had instances where we’ve had a warning, ceased the behavior, no issues afterwards. We all make mistakes.
I’ll have to go watch some of his videos. As a big seller, getting suspended is one of the worst thing that could happen.
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Jay: “Troy, look into my eyes. I am the ghost of xmas future.”
Now THAT was funny!!!
I get it and I agree, and yes our inventory has doubled (and will probably grow to about 4000-5000 to be where we want to be). My only point is that there is always a good reason to review your listings periodically, especially in the space that we are in. I have seen Miss Me jeans that used to sell in the $50 drop to $30, Silver Jeans that were $30-$40 are now in the $20s. For us, reviewing the market is a reality. We just CAN’T be List It and Forget It…it doesn’t work in this space.
And even some collectible and holiday items are similar. Veronica can speak more to this, but price realities change, eBay categories change, etc. She even recently took new photos on a 2 year old item, relisted, sold in a week. Would it have sold without it? Who knows.
I just see the value in reviewing what we are selling periodically to see if it is still a good listing. Not all the time, but 3 times a year for us has worked out.
PS – Yeah, that bump from 30 day listings was $200-$300 a month, so worth it for $2,400-$3,600 a year. And with a bigger inventory now, that bump should be bigger. No worries, we will be able to handle it through SixBit…
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Terri, That’s great about InkFrog….when the fuss started about the GTC cgange, I told the better half that I figured it wouldn’t take long for someone to come up with a widget or something to end GTCs early…and sure enough, InkFrog did…wonder if others, like Six Bit, will follow suit….
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I don’t use GTC because I have around 300 listings, a small store. In general I don’t like to sign up for permanently renewing fees of any type– like auto renewals of magazines for example. I’m afraid I’ll forget to cancel and get charged over and over.
I don’t think that people who have very large stores (which comes with lower listing fees) and who also use GTC should say it is no big deal to force people to GTC. Ok, it is not a big deal for people with your business model. But it is a big change for smaller sellers, who pay higher fees.
Listing on ebay will feel like committing to an endless permanent magazine subscription that you have to remember to cancel, or they will keep charging you forever. I think this will drive smaller and more casual sellers away and hurt the character of ebay.
Also–you can’t compare Amazon having “eternal” listing versus Ebay, because it is FREE to list on Amazon. Ebay wants you to sign up to “eternally” PAY a listing fee.
Another point– I assume they will leave option to sort by “ending soonest” and I think that would just have auctions that are ending. So BINs will have a disadvantage in comparison with auctions. Or will GTC BINs still show up under “ending soonest.”
Just my random thoughts…
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This may be the best update ebay has had.
-Defaulting to GTC is good in my opinion
-They are adding the ability to edit on the fly in active listings.
-They FIXED the new shipping page!!! Fed Ex AND drop down menus for choosing your option. When I saw the drop down menu last night, I swear the lights got brighter and I heard angels singing “Hallelujah”.Maybe there is hope for ebay after all…
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maybel9,
GTC are treated like 30 day FP listings when it comes to ending soonest. In other words , just as a 30 day FTP shows up in ending soonest as it comes to the end of its 30 days, so does a GTC. So, there’s really no change in Ending Soonest searches. (Well, I guess not exactly true….some sellers have been using shorter duration FP listings, such as ten day, so they appear more frequently in Ending Soonest….while those sellers will still be able to end their GTC listings on the 10th day, they won’t see any benefit in Ending Soonest, because the benefit comes as the listing approaches 30 days, and ending it 20 days too soon will likely eliminate the advantage)
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I often get offers on items with the “ending soon” tag. A lot of buyers don’t realize that the clock will just reset once it ticks down.
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For those of you who don’t use GTC, and re-list every time the listing is expired, do you not worry about those buyers who are watching, or bookmarked your items? As a buyer, I tend to watch a lot of items I’m interested in buying in the future – however, when they are “gone”, I may go elsewhere then quickly buying the item I’ve researched and “watched” for a future purchase.
From the buyer’s perspective, it’s an annoyance that I have when I watch and item and it goes away without a sale. There has been a lot of items over the years I would have bought eventually that have lost me as a buyer since they were either re-listed under a different item number, or removed prematurely.
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I don’t worry about it. Over 10 years, I’ve had probably 4-5 people ask me if something sold when it disappeared and I just sent them a link to the new listing. Also, I’m pretty sure that most of my inventory isn’t something that people would watch for months before deciding to purchase. Once in awhile if something has a good number of watchers 7-10 and I decide to drop the price for the next 30 days, I’ll do a relist instead of a sell similar.
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Jay, About ending soonest. There are a lot of small sellers, especially of used stuff, who believe that many buyers use “ending soonest” rather than Best Match. I’m not one of them. I personally believe the vast majority of buyers use Best Match for the simple reason that it’s the default, and most people most everywhere use the default for most things. (Also, some years ago, ebay disclosed the percentage of searches conducted with Best Match, and, if I remember correctly , it was north of 90%. I doubt that has changed much).
Yes, I sometimes have items that sell as they are near the end of their 30 day period. I don’t think it’s because buyers are using Ending Soonest, I suspect it’s because the items are on watch lists and the buyers got a reminder from ebay saying “this is ending soon.”
But…as I say…there are some sellers who swear their sales will crumble if they can’t get seen in Ending Soonest’s first page. My post is simply to explain that GTC will show in Ending Soonest, so, for anyone who has been using 30 day rather than GTC because of “Ending Soonest”, well, don’t worry about it. NO difference there.
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Mycottage9 – Thanks for explaining that GTC also shows up in “ending soonest”
Jay– If you do a general search and then sort by “ending soonest” that will apply to the BINs and auctions by default. The buyer would have to make an extra step to see only BINs.
Also, I don’t necessarily believe that LOTS of buyers sort by “ending soonest.” But logic would tell us that SOME buyers sort by “ending soonest.” I do see a slight increase on BIN items as they are close to ending.Inglewood– I believe that ebay sends the buyer a message when I relist an unsold BIN item that they were watching at a lower price. I have received such a message saying something like, hey this is relisted at a lower price.
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Basically I want ebay to succceed. My life is simpler if all the collectors come to one central location- ebay!
I think ebay is hurting itself when it makes things more difficult/risky/offputting for small sellers. I think small sellers add a lot of value and character to ebay.
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Understood. I hope eBay stops charging for listing like most other sites.
Though lets be clear: nothing is ever free.
–Sure its free to list on Amazon, but then they take a larger fee when you sell, or you pay for a yearly Professional Seller License.
–On Poshmark, its free to list but then they take 20% of the profit. eBay charges to list but the only takes 13.5%.Just different recipes to get your money on the different platforms.
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Maybe they could just make money like Facebook or Google and collect our information to sell to advertisers / whoever wants to buy it. If Facebook marketplace grows, could that be the standard? You could start getting pop up ads based on what you search on eBay, or is that already happening?
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I have to say, I really wouldn’t want to see ebay go to completely free listings. ebay doesn’t vet its sellers (as some sites, such as Ruby Lane, do). Vetting provides an entry barrier (just like Amazon’s “gated” categories…more and more categories at Amazon are gated. How would ebay sellers react if ebay gated categories…free listings in those cats, but only IF you pass the vetting process. I don’t think it would go over very well. And by the way, I do think itcould eventually come to that) )
Look, someone wants to open a brick and mortar business, there are some serious costs and risks. Someone wants to set up in an antique mall? There’s a cost. Even a flea market. And consignment shops don’t sell your stuff for free, not even close. I shudder at an ebay with NO entry barrier.
If there’s no listing fee, ebay risks being over run with junk from people who have no real skin in the game. Years ago, ebay made most of its money from listing fees, not FVFs. Today, ebay makes most of it from FVFs. Years ago, the truth is, ebay pushed people to LIST with little concern whether stuff sold or not….as long as people kept listing, ebay kept making money. Which is why, back then, ebay never said: Know your numbers. Many sellers had no idea how little they were actually netting…they saw cash flow and they were happy….many sellers had no idea what “net profit” meant.
Today, eBay’s financial situation is MUCH better aligned with sellers….with most of its revenue coming from FVFs, ebay needs to help sellers SELL, not LIST. And that’s what ebay is trying to do.
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That’s a really good point I hadn’t thought of. I just assumed eBay would have to provide free listings just to compete. But maybe listings are a way to weed out lazy, bad sellers.
When I look at Craigslist these days, there’s a lot of junk and scammy listings. Not sure how Poshmark and other free sites are. eBay has its share of junk too, but sellers have to pay for it so its not perpetual junk.
My point is that even if eBay felt they needed to compete so made listings free, they’d make up the income in another way.
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Jay, One reason Poshmark is free (IMO) is because , as a relatively new site, they’d get no traction if they were charging sellers upfront. I would not assume oshmark will stay free forever….as they grow, they might start charging…
I do agree with you that if ebay did go to free, they’d make up for the income some way. I also think a couple scenarios are worth considering: 1. ebay gates certain categories. If you can get through the gate, you get free listings, but no one else can list except those who get in the gate. That allows ebay to control junk listings and bad sellers in those categories 2. Sites like Poshmark are still relatively small. If eBay goes to free unlimited listings, search would be a nightmare…except, since no one is paying to list, ebay really could just say : we’ll show only the listings we want to, after all, you aren’t paying us to show your listing, so what have you got to complain about if your listing isn’t showing?
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Thanks T-Satt!
And, in breaking news LOL, this just in: (from eBay):
Update on Good ‘Til Cancelled
ghammat44Executive ghammat44
Executive
03-01-2019 03:26:16 PM
Hey eBay sellers, this is Harry, VP of Seller Experience at eBay. As you read in the 2019 Early Seller Update, we are moving all Fixed Price listings to Good ‘Til Cancelled (GTC). As a reminder, this change does not apply to auctions. We’re making this change because we have seen that GTC listings offer more sales opportunities than any other fixed price duration. Over time, GTC listings keep and grow watchers, sales history, and SEO authority as they maintain the same item ID and URL for the life of the listing. We believe all of the above improves the ability for buyers to discover items on eBay, which thereby improves the likelihood of a sale.We’re aware of concerns some of you may have around managing GTC listings. Today in the Seller Hub Active listings page, you can see the start date of each of your listings. You can also sort by the start date to see, for example, your oldest listing at the top. With the start date, you can determine how long a listing has been active – but, currently, this requires you to do some math. By the end of March, we’ll do the math for you and will show you the number of days each listing has been active. Today, sellers can also sort active listings by end date or time left. For GTC listings, end date indicates the next date of renewal, and time left indicates the time left until renewal. Just as you do today, you can start, end, or relist your items at any time you choose.
All sellers may also take advantage of the out-of-stock feature, which allows you to effectively pause the availability of the item to buyers by setting the listing quantity to zero. This comes in handy if you want to keep all the benefits mentioned above (same item ID and URL, watchers, sales history and SEO benefits) while either your item is out-of-stock or you need a vacation. When you are ready to sell the item again, simply update the quantity back to a positive number. You can also use our bulk editing tools to update multiple listings at once.
We’re also aware of concerns about the 30 day auto-renewal period not syncing with monthly billing cycles. We’re looking into this. Thank you for your patience.
We always want to create the best experience we possibly can for our sellers. That’s why your feedback is so important to us. We look forward to continuing our partnership with you to improve your sales velocity and build a better marketplace.
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By the end of March, we’ll do the math for you and will show you the number of days each listing has been active.
Not a big deal for us, but it’l be cool to see the actual day count of items when they sell. “This hat took 698 days to sell!”
I wonder if eBay will still put that warning on listings older than 18 months.
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There are alot of comments here, so apologies if I am duplicating….
I absolutely found when I did “Sell Similar” listings that had ended after 30 days, I saw a boost in sales. But I think the key is ANY activity boosts including Buying (as I remember someone talking about before) and just posting new listings. I have made a notes in my calendar to End and Sell Similar around the 30 day mark but my store is very small and I have many market items. It is a great way to review and catch errors too. I am following advise someone (T-Satt?) brought back from Ebay Open that the key was Sell Similar not Relist so it is like new listings. GTC is fine for my odd or one of a kind listings so change does not bother me too much…
Elizabeth
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