ebay to drop listing fees?

Brooker_Dave

"Jim "Griff" Griffith gave listeners some tantalizing hints on his radio show this week about some upcoming eBay announcements and the direction of the marketplace. He said, "This is a big month at eBay. We're working on some interesting things, and a lot of them will be revealed in the next 30 days." Griff said he would announce the topic of the February 25 Town Hall meeting next week.

Griff also talked about the evolution of outside advertising on the site. He said eBay connects buyers and sellers, and advertising is a traditional form of connecting buyers and sellers. He went on to say:

Advertising is a way of monetizing the site. Everyone knows that that's a way,..free services usually have some form of advertising. Monetizing the site in a new way to allow for a restructuring of the way we currently monetize it. And I'm not saying anything else. I'll let you draw some conclusions or maybe let that take your thought process.

One AuctionBytes reader interpreted this as a hint that eBay is going to no listing fees. "Am I the only one that hears these hints?" he asked me. (I had speculated about such a move last summer.)

I also found some recent comments from Buy.com's CEO Neel Grover interesting. He told Internet Retailer that Buy has yet to experience big returns on its eBay investment, and that he would like to see diamond merchants like Buy.com given more prominence on eBay. "The overall benefit of what shoppers get with the diamond tier and the advantages of such merchants could have some branding around it," Grover told the magazine. Is he talking about a special icon next to Diamond PowerSeller listings? Is it possible eBay might give in to such requests?"

http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2009/2/1234448810.html#comments

frivolous_fay

But... but... I thought they were trying to boot out the hobby sellers? No listing fees will be a deluge of crap (like free listing days)

StaffsSW

I was listing on eBay Phillipines last night (Dont ask...!) and noticed that they have an interesting fee structure. No Insertion fees, no final value fees, but you only pay for listing upgrades...

It's likely with the free listings that Griff is atlking about, there will be some other condition attached to it - I think we've all been around long enough to know that eBay dont give owt for nowt.

As for the advertising - well, it's starting to make the site look like a cheap affiliates page.

Thistle-down

yes, probably along with higher final value fees.

Brooker_Dave

frivolous_fay wrote: »

But... but... I thought they were trying to boot out the hobby sellers? No listing fees will be a deluge of crap (like free listing days)

They might move to an Amazon style product listing where only new items can be sold BIN and postage is "free"?

soolin

Oh heavens, I am not a fan of the whole free listing scenario. Anyone who has been online for long enough will I'm sure remember the old Freeserve auctions. For every good item listed there were 10 pages of tat, it was free so why not list everything regardless of how good or bad it was.

In the end the genuine auctions for good items just got buried in pages of rubbish. I know what I list on cheap days