I’m seeing from a lot of news outlets as well that it’s not just the 30p transaction fee, but actually ALL fees.
Great for small time sellers, horrendous for businesses imo
Thoughts?
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Yes saw this news too and was waiting for someone else to mention it here as wasn’t sure if it was new news but seems to be getting lots of media coverage.
I do wonder though how much it will help (how many eBay sellers end up drifting into business seller tier and does this hit business sellers as they are now at a disadvantage?) no doubt it will help with buyers getting a slightly better deal / sellers keeping more of their own £ and can afford to reduce prices if on tight margins.
It definitely supports the low end stuff for sure as on a £20-30 card that’s basically £2-3 your potentially saving ? With grading prices reducing and turnaround times getting faster this seems to be a real net benefit.
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I wonder if this will affect price competition between private and business sellers seeing as private sellers will, in theory, be able to save almost 15% in fees.
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Very nice to hear they’re expanding this beyond Germany.
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If they do this they really need to be more strict on the criteria for being forced into a business account. I started off doing bulk bundles, and very quickly was doing 10~ sales per day, and after roughly 1 month I got forced into being a business seller.
But if you’re just doing slabs for instance, 10 sales a day is really good going and would probably put you up at the top of the UK ebay graded card sellers…
Essentially I just hope that people aren’t able to grade and flip like 150-200 graded cards a month at lower prices (due to no fees) without being marked as a business. Otherwise its just another kick in the teeth for those who try to abide by the rules and do things above board.
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Nice for private sellers, rough for business sellers.
Contrary to popular belief (maybe not on e4 but elsewhere), card reselling is a low margin business - it’s going to be tough for business sellers to compete with private sellers who don’t have to account for 10-15% in fees. That’s before you consider that higher turnover business sellers also need to collect VAT.
I have seen some evidence that eBay is in fact being more aggressive in converting private sellers to business where appropriate which is a good thing.
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Do they class a business seller by volume or value?
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It’s only for items sold inside the UK and for UK residents. Otherwise (like being a seller from outside the UK but using the UK ebay) you will still pay around 25% total on fees and everything
Totally not interesting for me.
So if a UK based sellers sells to China/USA for example, they still have to pay the sellers fee?
This will likely lead to a portion of sellers understandably choosing to disable the option of selling internationally.
If that is the case, yes. But I have no seen anything specific that indicates fees apply when selling internationally from the UK yet.
it’s pretty straight forward, it was the same with ebay.de
edit: though I guess the fee isn’t that bad tbh
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oooo… This could end up worse actually.
If you are a UK private seller you will have noticed the ‘80%’(sometimes varies) off selling fees offers you would get every two weeks or so. This meant you could sell internationally and pay a small amount of fees if you timed your listings for the offer period.
For the past few weeks I have not had that offer yet. Perhaps they are scrapping these offers for this new system?
(edit in response to the 3 percent addition to the last comment)
Scrap what I said previously, that is actually brilliant.
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I will echo though that the contrast in treatment to business sellers is severe. Not that eBay owes anyone anything. Hopefully eBay will eventually at least reduce fees for business sellers.
One thing to note in the auction house world it has been the trend to raise selling/buyers fees for decades (initially there was no buyers fee to begin with, Sothebys introduced theirs in 1979). Recently Sothebys announced that they were lowering fees which some see as a signal for a trend reversal in the auction world. I see the auction world as fairly adjacent to eBay. Hopefully this trend of lowering fees to buyers/sellers continues to grow!
I’m a UK ebayer (private seller) and I wouldn’t stop selling internationally because of this. We were already paying the international fee on top of the regular fee so only having to pay the 3% is still a big saving vs how much it cost to sell international before (12-13% final value fee + 3% international).
Also, I believe the payment processing fee still remains.
I have seen the communication that business sellers received about this and ebay seem to think that people selling more will mean people also BUYING more so it will boost their business sales.
I think businesses on ebay obviously play such a huge part in the place even existing so ebay need to do more to incentivise them. The playing field has now been tilted even more in favour of private sellers and people behaving as businesses but not registered as businesses. Also, business sellers have never received the fee discount promos that ebay used to dish out to private sellers every few weeks.
How will ebay make money with the loss of all the fees though? Don’t be surprised if some sort of buyer “protection” charge creeps in at some point…as far as I know, this is how other marketplaces in the UK make their money - by charging the buyer and keeping everything free for the sellers so that they stay around.
There is also the theory floating around that ebay are banking on sellers leaving their acquired funds in the upcoming ebay wallet rather than withdrawing to their bank and somehow making money/interest on all this accumulated cash.
The reality is that ebay has been forced into this. We have other platforms now where people (especially the younger generations) are selling stuff. Ebay had to remove all selling fees for clothes earlier in the year, for example, because of the platform called ‘Vinted’ which has no fees and has gotten seriously big in the last few years. There is another called ‘depop’ which is making moves, and, of course, there is the rise of Etsy (which sort of doesn’t count as it has similar fee rates to ebay here so is no cheaper). All of these platforms are meant to exist for specific niches but people seem to sell anything and everything on them, for free, which is hurting ebay. Vinted, for example, is supposed to be only for clothes but I’ve seen trading cards, videogames, and all sorts on there. I’ve also seen car parts on Etsy! And of course, none of these platforms are willing to clean house because of how much money they would lose.
As a private seller myself, who sells the odd few bits from my collection or household junk every now and then, this is of course great news for me, but I still don’t think this is the end. As I said, I seriously believe that some sort of small fee or charge for buyers (like how it works in real auction houses) could come into play if ebay don’t make the profits that they expected.
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