*NEW* current changes on ebay from 16th June

tyzer2001

soolin wrote: »

I agree that £3.99 could seem to be better than £4. However all the big stores do of course now sell in round figures. M and S , Primark, Matalan Littlewoods etc.The increase in non cash payments has made the use of opening the tills as an excuse redundant.

However I still can't really see why people say that there item isn't worth £3.99 for instance and they can't sell it anymore , I wonder how on earth they were getting £3.99 for it before then?

We weren't! We were getting 99p, and spending the £3 on P and P! The difference now is that people will think we ARE getting £3.99!!!!
They'll also assume that postage is chreaper than it actually is - so they'll think 'Hmm, £3.99, prob costs about two quid to post..."

juju11_2

Well I am totally gutted about this and the first thing I realised this free P&P malarky was being enforced was when I just tried to relist an iPod Touch case.

I started it at 99p with 2.50 P&P (recorded, 2nd class). My final value fee would have only been 5p and 28p to PayPal. Total of 33p

If I now want to relist it it will go something like this... £3.49 start price, insertion fee of 15p, final value fee of at least 18p and 32p to PayPal - new fees total of 65p - nearly doubling my fees!

How is this beneficial to anyone? Obviously not great for me as a Seller, but as others have already said, the Buyer will look at a start price of £2.49 more negatively than a start price of 99p.

I am so gutted and now have to suss out which categories are 'free P&P' and which aren't. I am a personal seller who makes a little bit of pocket money off Ebay to keep things ticking over at home. GUTTED.

bluejake

juju11 wrote: »

I started it at 99p with 2.50 P&P (recorded, 2nd class). My final value fee would have only been 5p and 28p to PayPal. Total of 33p

If I now want to relist it it will go something like this... £3.49 start price, insertion fee of 15p, final value fee of at least 18p and 32p to PayPal - new fees total of 65p - nearly doubling my fees!

How is this beneficial to anyone?

Ebay thinks it is beneficial to them because the fees they receive have increased. Buyers pay more because Ebay's fees have increased. Sellers lose because Ebays fees have increased. Simple - they are just after a slice of the postage fees.

Ebay used to be interesting because of the flea market stuff listed. That is what made it different to other sites like Amazon. I used to sell bits and bobs and that made me go back to the site and buy stuff as well. Their fee increases have made me stop selling but I also go there less and now hardly ever buy anything. It has lost it's interest to me. They're killing what made it unique.

TurkishDelight

Tirian wrote: »

It's not that people can't do the maths - it's just psychology. If the item price is 99p, people kid themselves that they're getting something for under a quid. They don't see the postage cost as integral to the price of the item. But if you make it part of the face value, people will ask themselves 'do I really think this thing is worth £3 or £5 or whatever it comes to.

The same reason why shops price things at 3.99 or 4.99 rather than £4 or £5. It's not that people are too stupid to realise that the difference is only a penny - it's that these sort of purchasing decisions depend more on feeling and subconscious reactions that, for example, perceive the difference between £3.99 and £4.00 as being greater than the penny's worth that it really is.

It's faulty psych actually. It works only where there is one number (ie, just item price), not two, as the whole point of it is that the brain can't process odd numbers as quick- so if you have a buyer that is looking at your item and both your prices are odd the brain will struggle more to think about the price.
You might see that as a good thing, but given the choice (and they are) a buyer will go for a total price that is higher but easier.

cyberbob

I've been offering free delivery on quite a few items fo six months or so and my sales obviously increased. I will be interested to see if they now go down in the categories that have made everyone give free P&P. As buyers will get used to it. Just a thought

soolin

I'm going to 'unsticky' (Is that a word?) this thread as I think anyone affected by the changes will be aware of them by now.

If there are any other big changes that come up I'll do a sticky post for a while when the changes become live.