Does eBay UK offer the the eBay Standard envelopes that you can buy the postage and print it out. Those have the internal tracking on it and will show when it’s delivered, at least in the US. Another way they can make more money 
No, we don’t have anything like that
I actually think this is great news. One thing I’ve lamented for ages now, is how we lost the point of ebay. It was supposed to be the internet’s garage sale. However it sort of morphed into a platform for businesses, where individuals who just still use it for that sort of thing are held to all kinds of weird standards. Once they added tons of rules I stopped selling stuff. I would use it as a place to occasionally sell a little thing here or there which I knew had value to someone, but that I had no interest in. Used clothes thrift shopping on ebay is crowded out by cheap chinese drop shipping and I gave up on that. Its the same for etsy, arguably now worse in every way. But it WAS a great place to find nice hand crafted items. Loved etsy in the early days. Literally all the people i’ve bought from no longer use etsy. Gone, closed up.
So for ebay to try to foster that spirit again is a good move. I still won’t because of their KYC requirements, I trust ebay %0 with my details to not get hacked for it.
For businesses if they also increase their support and to crack down on scam buyers, then it would definately be a good thing and justify their insane fees. %15 fees is just insane. But I have little concept of what being a seller is like and the nuance. I am only aware that ebay ALWAYS sides with the buyer in a dispute automatically even if its clear as day that the buyer is scamming the seller and you have to work needlessly hard to get a second round review.
It seems to me like they are testing the waters.
I sort of have to disagree. These new changes are only moving eBay a step closer to KILLING the original car boot/market atmosphere and shifting the platform towards businesses.
Let me begin by saying that I do NOT agree with people using private accounts to act like businesses and dodge all fees. BUT, there are a lot of people who love selling crap out of their house or constantly “recycling” bits of their collections to fund new purchases. On the surface, somebody may look at the volume being sold on such accounts and incorrectly say, “you should be a business” but that absolutely isn’t the case. The new changes will encourage people like this to either just leave or become (unnecessarily) business account sellers themselves.
And if you need to send everything tracked to get your money as fast as possible, then say goodbye to all the little knick knacks and small, cheap items that people (as you said) sell on ebay simply to save wasting them, and also pocket a few pounds in the process, unless we want to be buying stuff where the postage is higher than the value of the item.
Example: what about older, worthless commons/uncommons that you might want to pick up, no businesses offer them for sale anymore, and no private sellers will be willing to list them because of the cost of tracked postage?
Buyers are also going to be encouraged to buy from businesses if it means no buyer protection fees. Again, this is no bad thing as plenty of business sellers are playing by the rules, working hard, and have spent far too long being unfairly undercut by fake “private” sellers. But this isn’t going to move ebay back to a car boot atmosphere if those kind of private sellers all back away and we get left with just another generic digital marketplace. At least in the OG ebay days you got you money into your Paypal account without proof of delivery and it was a far looser, more free place in line with the idea of a digital car boot. Now it’s just another platform strangled by rules, red tape, and being expected to act “professional”.
I’ve seen this coming over the years so it’s not a huge surprise to me. Even with all the small details such as the language of ebay changing i.e. “Sales” becoming “Orders” as if you were a business and all the other countless similar examples…
I’m a private seller and this will impact me quite a bit I reckon. I’m always selling bits and pieces of my collections to supplement my disposable income and help buy new stuff but all those lower end items that compound once you add them all up will no longer be worth selling. It will also take me longer to receive my money so the rate at which I’m willing to buy will slow down. And it will likely cost me more to buy items from private sellers going forwards with the new fee + having to pay for tracked shipping on more and more lower end things, further reducing my buying power.
I’m already looking at my finances and having to reign it in a bit thanks to the cost of living here, ridiculous power bills/rent, taxes, ongoing food inflation etc. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about being broke but I still need to be sensible with what I spend on luxuries.
And nobody should believe that crap about the buyer protection fees paying for ebay to uphold that protection lol. They made a knee jerk reaction to the surge of the likes of Vinted, made everything free to compete, and then found out (as we all predicted) that they can’t make up that loss of private seller fees through private sellers using their profits to drive traffic to business accounts (a completely stupid, reaching theory-based idea that NEVER sounded right). The ebay shareholders are probably angry and so this latest raft of changes were made. And all that pending money from buyers will have even LONGER to sit in some slush account being invested/manipulated in some way to make ebay MORE money. All the while the site remains an unstable, glitchy, poorly-designed mess where every simple action seems to take far more clicks than it should.
Apologies for the huge post but tl;dr - not a fan! (though I completely saw this coming)
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I have mostly sold items with tracking or signed delivery for anything above 30/50£ cost, so don’t think the actual change will impact much how I sell things.
Said that what I really dislike, is the fact that they are going to hold funds for so long, especially for untracked deliveries also 2 days seems long for tracked as well,
More in general I am against the recent changes to not send payments directly to linked bank accounts.
They clearly did it to show their investors that they have less money going out of the business, all they will have to do now is just showing a number to users on the dashboard, it won’t be money going out until the user decide to withdraw,
It also can be a bit predatory on people mind (especially the young), because if you have funds sitting there is more likely you are going to spend it(fomoing on something) compared to when you have it sitting in the bank account.
One thing that I can see happen is additional costs to the buyer, most sellers now will opt for signed/tracked deliveries and will make the buyer pay for ir.
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Maybe interesting to note that Mercari US tried to move to what sounds like a similar system (no seller fees, buyers pay the fee on top of the listed item price—Mercari US already has payment only after the buyer confirms receipt of an item and rates the seller) and are backtracking that change in a couple days after a few months of implementation (shifting now to a weird hybrid model with some seller fees and some buyer fees). Mercari US does have envelope tracking similar to Ebay US though.
Edit: Wanted to add that Mercari also added a $2 funds withdrawal fee, which, as you can imagine, was incredibly unpopular. They’re retracing on this too.
thanks for your response. I’m going to again, be up front that I have no idea how it works now, nor do I fully understand what the changes are in detail. On the surface I see that there is going to be fewer fees and requirements for people making infrequent posts to sell stuff. That was all I was really making comments about. And I was always aware that ebay is known to side with buyers who scam people regularly by default. So it sounded like they were going to change things to stop doing that as much. Of course that is just what they say, in practice we would still have to see what shakes out. Believe me, I don’t trust them to actually do anything they claim to do until they do it.
So i don’t really understand, you make it sound like they are increasing the cost to small sellers. But it looks like they are eliminating the seller’s fees if you stay small. But then when you do enough sales they put you into the standard seller category that is applied to anyone right now. So clearly I’m not understanding something here. And maybe, that is the point. Make it more convoluted and hide and shuffle around cost burdens without actually making it cheaper to sell.
I don’t know anything about this whole thing with tracking either. I really have no idea what you were even describing as this is something I don’t understand or know about I guess.
Also I don’t think its unfair to wait for payments to clear until a package is recieved(Boy would that be saving me right now). But I also don’t trust that means that ebay won’t just do something slimy by holding funds. I’d assume they are getting battered by the vast amounts of charge backs from scammers on both sides of transactions these days. Those credit card fees on charge backs and reversals probably add up. So I kind of get that from their end to be fair. But again, I dunno how it works, I don’t sell. I just buy.
My theory is unless prices on eBay go down by 4% on items out of the uk as the sellers no longer paying that fee then I’m not buying from the uk. Would work out to be 14% more as I Aust buyer as I have to pay gst into the country
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When Mercari US implemented the changes, I feel like no one really made the price changes to compensate for the change in fee structure. Or maybe it was just too small to notice (roughly 10%). I doubt you’re going to notice a 4% change on price on general listings a few months after the change takes place. Think you’re just gonna have to stick to being comfortable with the price you’re paying for what you’re getting.
this is why I had issues with sellers. I was still looking at my final price as a buyer, but sellers were just wanting to still have the sticker price remain the same. I wasn’t using mercari much to start with, but that drove me away. I actually found that to be better if only because it let the buyer finally see just how egregious fees are. I kind of wish the buyer could still see the fee breakdown even if the fee is on the seller’s end. I think it might help everyone understand just how much the seller gets in the end. But I think they won’t because that doesn’t help ebay/mercari etc. in any way. It makes them look like the bad guy and makes buyers more sympathetic to the sellers. I think they’d rather we just have animosity between ourselves than point fingers at the websites.
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As a seller, I adjusted my prices in the beginning but eventually stopped, meaning items would be priced the same on Ebay and Mercari, but I’d net more if they sold on Mercari. I mostly sell items around $5-$20, so it’s possible the extra 10-12% wasn’t that noticeable, but I think, in the end, it really just boils down to whether you are happy with the final total price as a buyer. Whether the seller adjusted prices down or not is irrelevant, because people price above, at, and below market price all the time.
I also don’t really think typical buyers really care what the seller nets in the end, so disclosing fees (if seller fees are actiive) wouldn’t change the equation at all. Again, in my view, the buyer cares only about the price they pay—that’s all.
4% when converting to aud works out to be more like 8% then I pay a import fee of 10% tax on that final amount. It appears my middle man going to be getting a lot more shit now as I’ll be forced to use the wide west that is cardmarket
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I’m talking about entering a custom offer and just getting rebuffed specifically. Not static prices with no chance to make a negotiation. Given the chance I will almost always send offers unless its something truly special that I just need to snag before anyone else does.
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Ah, gotcha. Like I said, I price items equally on Ebay and Mercari, but if someone throws me an offer on Mercari that nets me the same as if it had sold on Ebay (or pre-fee-change Mercari), I would happily accept that offer. To do otherwise is a bit silly, I agree.
Personally I wouldn’t lower my prices to compensate for buyers having to pay the fee (unless I’m misunderstanding what is being discussed above). Maybe as a business seller I would feel moved to do so to remain competitive but, as a private seller, unless I’m desperate to get rid of something to raise funds, I don’t see why I should take less because of ebay’s policies. After all, I will already be paying more as a BUYER so I’m not going to doubly lose by also reducing my listing prices. I will continue to just list for what I want to receive for an item and it’s up to the buyer if they want to pay for it on their end with the fees involved…
It’s smaller items that will be affected worse in terms of percentage I feel. The £0.75 flat rate alone is huge on, say, £0.99 commons (especially since it compounds if buying a bunch of them in one go) and that’s before you factor in the 4%.
But a £100.00 item will come out at £104.75 which I feel isn’t worth complaining about when you’ve already got the ability to dump £100.00 on a non-essential purchase.
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It won’t affect fees for small sellers but it makes their items less attractive which will hurt their sales and discourage from listing. Example: you list, under the current system, a £3.00 card that you offer with standard 2nd class envelope postage at a cost of £0.85. So total to the buyer is £3.85.
(As a disclaimer, I wouldn’t personally recommend wasting the time selling £3.00 cards ANYWAY unless you are a business seller that can shift heaps of them and get a decent compounding effect when it all adds up. This is just a hypothetical example to illustrate a point…)
Under the new system with a buyer having to pay the £0.75 + 4% Protection Fee (it sounds so mafia-like, doesn’t it?), that £3.00 card becomes £3.87. Maybe not a world-ending issue but this does all add up if you are buying multiple items.
Now, if the seller wants their money as fast as possible, they will need to send with tracking so that it can be confirmed as delivered by ebay and the funds released as fast as possible. The cheapest tracked postage that can be applied to a domestic letter is Tracked 48 at a cost of £2.70, a massive jump from the £0.85 standard 2nd class letter that could have been offered before.
This now makes the total for that card £3.87 + £2.70 = £6.57 to the buyer. On the current system, the cheapest a seller could offer would be £3.00 + £0.85 = £3.85.
£6.57 vs £3.85 for that same card is pretty big imo.
Obviously this all theoretical and based on assumptions of how private sellers will react to the changes. Maybe they will still use the standard £0.85 2nd class letter and wait 14 days for their money. Or maybe they will feel the choice of offering tracked only (to ensure they get their payout faster) or just not bothering listing cheap stuff altogether, reducing the market supply of low end items in the long term. Maybe a lot of people won’t read the changes properly and the “waking up” will take place over a long period of time. Nothing is set in stone really…this is all just overly analytical assumptions that I probably shouldn’t be wasting time calculating lol.
Also, I don’t agree with having to wait for delivery confirmation to get your money as a private seller because we’re back to the system of being expected to pay for shipping materials and postage labels out of your own money, something that people kicked off about when ebay first took over handling the money from Paypal, and wouldn’t make funds available for at least a week. This was the whole reason that they brought forward payouts to the next working day. And now they are just flip-flopping backwards again, maintaining zero consistency.
Under the current system, a private seller can offer 2-3 days dispatch time, wait a day for the funds to arrive in their ebay wallet, and then use those funds to purchase shipping labels from ebay, and still physically dispatch a package within the quoted 2-3 day lead time. This is completely fair imo.
Operating as a BUSINESS seller…well, you would expect to have a delay in receiving your money until items had been delivered or a set amount of days had passed because a lot of business arrangements work that way and you don’t sort out paying yourself and all that stuff until the end of the month. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a viable business to operate a functioning cashflow that can absorb shipping costs until all the money comes in at the end of the month (or a week, or whatever the policies are depending on who you are dealing with).
(Obviously this change doesn’t affect ebay business sellers who will continue to receive funds from sales into their account as quickly as possible but that is neither here or there in this private seller debate)
Also worth adding that even private sellers (with no fees) still need to pay fees for sending to an overseas address. A raft of recent EU GSPR policies, poorly communicated by ebay it has to be said, has also already encouraged sellers to simply switch off shipping to Europe since all the technicalities and potential scenarios have been so badly explained that some sellers just want to play it safe and not bother at all for fear of consequences due to genuine mistakes and an inability to decipher very vague rules.
Every change ebay have made over the last 12 months with their constant knee-jerk reactions is just a blatant copy of a Vinted policy…there is nothing original. They are on the back foot and honestly look like they have no long term strategy other than reacting every 6 months and implementing “fixes” or “improvements” that almost always require further patches or u-turns down the line. You can now no longer accept a system and assume that you can understand and work with it for the next 12 months because they will just tear the rules up again in 6 months. All the while, their transparency and communication remains disappointing, and their platform remains prone to bugs, glitches, poor design etc.
So that was a beast of a post and probably seems overly serious. Life will go on, and maybe it won’t be doomsday at all. I could be completely wrong and things just work out fine. I’m fully aware that in the grand scheme of life, so much thought and detail on this topic didn’t need typing out by myself but there it is 
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Some of the things you discuss above were exact points being touched on when Mercari US moved to the no-seller-fee system (How would sellers react? How would buyers react?). A number of people in the subreddit said they just took down all their listings off Mercari because they didn’t agree with the changes. And like I said, Mercari themselves responded to the feedback and are backtracking to a fee system more remniscent of the original system.
Seems like Mercari was less messy though, since the buyer cost towards shipping would automatically be applied towards shipping, and you’d only have to wait for payout on the list price (i.e. no money out of pocket for labels). This is assuming you aren’t using a free-shipping-with-shipping-built-into-list-price method of pricing.
What we were discussing above was related to this. Let’s say Ebay is moving from a 10%-seller-fee system to a 4%-buyer-fee system. If you don’t budge your prices on your listings, you’re actually making more money off the new system and the buyer is paying more than they would have on the old system (new system: seller gets 100% of list price while buyer pays 104% of list price vs old system: seller gets 90% of list price while buyer pays 100% of list price). In this example, if you adjusted your price to maintain the exact same payout in the new system, the buyer gets a better price for the same net effect on the seller (seller brings list price down to 90% to net the same amount, and buyer is now paying roughly 94% of previous list price). Like you said though, 4% is hardly enough to be noticable, so what might happen is that most sellers don’t budge their price, the buyers pay a little more for their items, and the sellers net a bit more.
The other things you mentioned (i.e. tracked shipping for faster payout, international sales, etc.), I don’t know much about because I’m not in the UK.
I completely understand what you mean here with this explanation. However, in the UK, we have been on a zero seller fees system for private sellers for the last 6 months or so (I forget the exact date of implementation) so to adjust prices down now in order to compensate for buyers fees would only make us lose money, surely.
Of course, the argument could be made that we massively gained when the previous/outgoing zero fees system came in if we also didn’t drop prices vs the early 2024 12.8% fees structure. But I don’t like to get into the feelings-based “logic” of “you had it good now you get what you deserve” viewpoint.
The one constant though is that the market and demand will dictate prices anyway, regardless of any of this. So while I won’t undersell myself, my asking prices are still going to be formed based on first checking what similar/same items have actually sold for, and what is also listed.
But yeah, so much remains to be seen and is currently an unknown thanks to ebay never being clear and concise with their communication that always creates more questions than answers.
I doubt it based on the information so far but if ebay DOES allow the postage cost to at least be paid up front to the seller, as in the Mercari example you speak about, then that would go some way to improving the situation. However, I highly doubt this for the reason that ebay UK (I don’t know about the US version or other markets) have not been lenient on postage costs at all for years now. When we were paying fees, the final value fees also took postage charges into account so you technically never received the asking amount anyway, something that punished anybody who was fair and only asked the exact amount it was going to cost to ship.
(I believe Etsy also did the same when I briefly used that, and I absolutely disagree with being charged fees on postage)
Of course, fees on shipping only existed because sneaky sellers were taking money off of item prices and bumping up their shipping charge so that they paid final fees on less of the overall cash they received. I can’t see ebay ever reversing course on shipping for this reason. For example: if ebay followed Mercari’s lead and at least allowed the postage to come through to the seller, I could ask for £5 to ship something, that amount comes through, and I spend less on the actual label, then pocket the excess from the ebay wallet where any remaining funds can be withdrawn. I can see that system being gamed for sure, unless the postage funds went into a separate place that couldn’t be accessed. It gets too complicated then though!
We’ll just have to wait and see though and see what actually happens and how many of these theorised issues don’t actually manifest in reality.
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