Ebay Fee Hike and Ways to Overcome it
Ebay Sellers
1. Start your own online store. It is not hard as you think. Don’t leave your business solely in the hands of big companies like eBay. I am not asking you to close down your eBay store instantly. List on eBay and also work on your online store. When items sell on eBay, send a letter to your customer with the link of your shop. Next time they may come straight to your online store and purchase it from there. It saves you listing and final value fee.
You can use the money you spend on eBay on advertising in search engines to bring traffic to your website initially. In the eBay model seller is often forgotten, but if you have a store people tend to come back to the store. People trust stores and online businesses more than buying from eBay. These factors can work in your favour.
2. Build up competition for eBay. When you list an item on eBay list the same item on other websites and let people know you are listing on other websites.
Few places you can try out are
Google base
Yahoo auctions if you are in USA.
If there is proper competition prices will come down. Like the mobile phone prices have come down over the years when more players entered the market.
There are more options in our directory.
3. Build up a seller’s forum. Try to workout some thing to stop the monopolistic attitude of the big companies.
In February EBay lured a lot of sellers into opening shops by offering them more visibility on searches and fewer fees on standard auctions. Five months later EBay decided that it was not a good move and decided to decrease visibility on searches and almost tripled the EBay fee. Sellers in Australia, USA and Uk are not happy with this move.
There is a protest going on in these eBay websites against the store fee hike. People are filing petitions and some are creating innovative auctions. It needs to be seen that all this will have any effect on eBay.
EBay CEO Meg Whitman commented that "The marketplace has been overwhelmed with identical, often poorly-priced items that have diluted the magic of the eBay experience.” I can understand eBay pulling the plug on Store visibility, but cannot understand the logic of increasing the fees at the same time. EBay can do this because they are a monopoly.
There are many ways you can combat the fee rise and plan for your future.
1. Start your own online store. It is not hard as you think. Don’t leave your business solely in the hands of big companies like eBay. I am not asking you to close down your eBay store instantly. List on eBay and also work on your online store. When items sell on eBay, send a letter to your customer with the link of your shop. Next time they may come straight to your online store and purchase it from there. It saves you listing and final value fee.
You can use the money you spend on eBay on advertising in search engines to bring traffic to your website initially. In the eBay model seller is often forgotten, but if you have a store people tend to come back to the store. People trust stores and online businesses more than buying from eBay. These factors can work in your favour.
2. Build up competition for eBay. When you list an item on eBay list the same item on other websites and let people know you are listing on other websites.
Few places you can try out are
Google base
Yahoo auctions if you are in USA.
If there is proper competition prices will come down. Like the mobile phone prices have come down over the years when more players entered the market.
There are more options in our directory.
3. Build up a seller’s forum. Try to workout some thing to stop the monopolistic attitude of the big companies.
