There's some loose marbles somewhere

After trying for a quiet February, and failing, the hope of a short break in March was high on the agenda.  Seems eBay anticipated that too, because what they've thrown at us this month has certainly made that dream fade away into nothingness ... in the nicest possible way.

First the UK threw a Free Listing Weekend at us on the 8th & 9th - cheers guys, the 9th was our wedding anniversary, and I'm severely in the dog house for working straight through the weekend without a break.  The UK offer was only for items starting at 99p or under, so it was a rare opportunity for me to do some serious damage to the incense stocks - over 2,000 incense listings went up, and another 1,000+ of other items like leaf skeletons and other small arts & crafts supplies.

Then Belgium gave us another 2 days of Free listings on the 9th & 10th, and almost caught me unprepared, which would have been a major sin - the Belgian offer was for ALL starting prices, and as they use the Euro, I knew I could pick up sales from Holland, France, Germany, even Italy and Ireland, from the listings on Belgium.  And I could also use Turbo Lister with Listing Designer templates free, and 10-day auctions without extra charge - Yippee!  Lotsa listings and sales.

Now, Canada and the USA have declared an "everyone welcome" 1-cent listing bonanza until the end of the month, and remembering Gallery is free on Canada and the US now, even though the maximum start price is 99-cents, it's another opportunity to clear the million or so pieces of incense, and similar quantity of leaf skeletons, sitting in the store room - watch for us uploading listings daily between now and the end of the month.

I'm not actually that fussed about the UK's Free Gallery until month end - the insertion fee is still one of the more expensive around Planet eBay, and it's not enough to tempt me into doing special listing effort - especially as I know it's only being done to bolster quarter-end listing numbers in order that they can posture that the policy revisions in January are working.  It also includes an element to offset the number of sellers leaving eBay due to those policy changes - you only need to visit any other site, blog, forum, or major news channel site to find evidence of that happening.  Heck, you only need to look at once vibrant categories to see what the effect of the new policy has been.

A year ago, when any form of special promotion was under way, if I went to Toys and Games and looked under Wargaming for the 15mm Tabletop category, I'd find 6,000 - 7,000 listings in there, swamping any visibility for my model buildings.  Last week when the Free Listing Weekend stuff was still live, there was just about 700 listings in there.  Yet, 15mm wargaming has always been a prime target for listing on Free or very cheap listing promotions.  More than that, during the last couple of days of promotion-fee listings' lives, you'd usually find around 70% - 80% of auctions had bids on them.  Last week it was more like 30%.  More evidence that this once vibrant and exciting (to sell in) category is dying rapidly after the changes, and I don't think it's alone.

But there is some good news - as we approach the mid point of our billing cycle this month, fees are WAY WAY DOWN - our running total of incurred fees so far this month is at about 40% of previous months.  Is this due to the revised fee structures from January?  A little bit of it is.  Much, much more of it is due to our revised listing strategies, and due to the fact that for most of this month trans-Atlantic exchange rates have been working in our favour.  In fact those exchange rates have halved our invoiced fees throughout March (except over Easter weekend when there was a blip in the rate).  All I'll say on that, is that it's due to billed-fee rounding during currency conversion - I don't want to give too much away in case the eBay bean counters decide to apply some creative accounting to stop it happening again.

So, our fees are down by 60%, but 50% is due to exchange rates, what's the other 10% due to?  a lickle ickle bit is due to the fee changes, a bit more than that due to the US now giving free gallery on every listing, the rest is due to the free listing days giving us a reason to not pay for extra listings for over a week, because we had so many freebies already running.

How much have the revised fees structures saved us this month? 

• In the US, they directly contributed to our bill dropping around 15% when you factor in increased FVF's but lowered insertion fees and free gallery on all listings. 
• In the UK, they INCREASED our costs by about 12%
• So overall, (ignoring the countries where we only list a little bit now and again), using the US and the UK side by side, we saved about 3%. 

It would have been less savings if we'd sold more, or, if we'd not listed on the US, we'd have paid more overall.

I can't help wondering if this is all part of the scheme of things?  After all, my analysis of promo-fee dates on both sides of the Atlantic, and the listing counts on both sites, show that the cutting of trans-Atlantic visibility for listings, was certainly not for the reasons given by eBay UK.  In fact, UK promotion days had zero effect on US listing counts, and negligable effect on total listings visibile on the US, nor any on the sell-through rates of US listings, nor on the balance of sales between Auction and BIN formats.  So what exactly prompted that visibility cut, because it certainly was not the UK swamping the US and depressing sales for USA sellers.

I have suspicions, but if I aired them here I'm sure I'd get banned.  I've published the supporting evidence elsewhere anyway (and not on my website - no use looking there) so if it's important to you,  I'm sure you'll be able to locate it, otherwise I'd simply recommend that you remember eBay operates on the World Wide Web, and has more than just one or two sites - do your invoice and bank balance a favour, look around the fees pages of other eBay sites, not just your home site..

For now, I'm just coasting along, enjoying the increased traffic to my listings and eBay shop, and making the most of all the free and super-cheap listing days.  But, having been banned from eBay forums for advising too many people about how to make the most profitable use of those, I also can't tell you too much in this blog.  (nudge nudge wink wink googleoogle).

Gaz

p.s. - word of the month = Scattergories ... the art of listing in as many categories as possible, at the same time, using duplicated listings for the same products.  And eBay thought location abuse was a problem ... wait until this one catches on ;-)