9 Major eBay Changes That Will Rock Your Selling World By Andrew | Posted January 29th, 2008

We were expecting big changes at eBay. They’ve been madly testing new ways of doing things in their Playground for a year. But even our IMC Advanced eBay Mentoring team was a little stunned at the scope of the changes!

Here’s a rundown.

Lower insertion fees for auction and fixed price listings (including Store Inventory Format listings).

This answers years of complaints from eBay sellers — who have been defecting to Amazon.com, which doesn’t charge listing fees.

Of course that means that there will be changes to Final Value fees. And reserve fees will no longer be refundable if the item sells.

Visit eBay’s Basic Fees page to see the changes.

Fixed Price Format items can no longer be listed for under $1.00.

This could have an impact on people selling info products like e-Books, and it undermines one of our favorite strategies for amassing a lot of feedback in a short time.

Gallery is free!

Well, duh. Listings with Gallery photos outsell listings without them by a big margin. An eBay Australia study found that items with pictures had a 17% higher sell-through rate, received 73% more bids, and achieved a final sale price 189% higher than those without. That’s good for sellers and GREAT for eBay. So what took them so long?

Tiered pricing for Featured Plus so more sellers will be able to have their items show up in the Featured box on the main page.

Several of the changes involve Detailed Seller Ratings, which now help determine how prominently a seller’s listings appear and what payment options they offer. Until now, only overall feedback counted. Detailed Seller Ratings ask for feedback on four specific areas of a transaction:

• item description
• communication
• shipping time
• shipping & handling charges

New standards for PowerSellers. As of July, it’s possible to lose PowerSeller status if a 4.5 Detailed Seller Rating score isn’t maintained. On the other hand, PowerSellers who meet the new criteria will be rewarded with discounts of 5 – 15% off their final value fees, unlimited PayPal protection, and greater exposure in the search listings.

Best Match becomes the default method for sorting searches. Since it started testing Best Match, eBay has found that it converts best of all the sort methods.

Best Match gets the DSR treatment too! Detailed Seller Ratings will be factored into the search algorithm, so once again, sellers with bad DSRs go down to the bottom of the listings. Sellers with 4.6 or higher DSR scores within the last 30 days will get increased exposure. Those with 4.2 or lower scores for shipping and handling over the last 30 days, or more than 5% buyer dissatisfaction in the last 30 days will get decreased exposure.

Sellers can no longer leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers.This one could get a lot of negative feedback from sellers! While there are checks and balances in place to make it fairer for sellers, any seller can tell horror stories of unscrupulous buyers or total newbies leaving undeserved bad feedback. Until now, retaliation has been the most effective way of getting down to an agreement.

Repeat customers now count toward a seller’s overall Feedback Score.Now sellers will be rewarded for offering the kinds of products and services that make people keep coming back to buy from them. There’s a time limit of one feedback comment per week. Feedback scores will also now consist of a rolling 12-month percentage instead of a lifetime score.

Want details? Visit www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200801.shtml#2008-01-29054823.

You might also want to take part in the Seller Webinar this Friday, February 1 at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. You can sign up here.

 

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