Do I need to FEAR the whims of eBay fees?

[ducks2k]

I am a hobby-level buyer/seller on eBay - more substantial than most, but this is not my primary source of income.  I am 50% stamp collector, 50% stamp dealer and 50% computer programmer.  Based on sensible guesses about listings and sales, I have mostly been a "Basic" store subscriber - the next level higher up for quite a while until it had a big price raise, but "basic" seems about right.  For a couple of decades, I have made auctions work (my area is Collectable Stamps).  I am exploring a real store of fixed price items which would rationally consist of around 3,000 different items, which, individually would sell infrequently.

If I have to pay for 3,000 listing fees every month, then there is no way that a store can be justified, based on anticipated sales.  It might be useful to buyers, because I can offer things that are not available from any other seller, but the huge fixed costs would be a deal-breaker for me.

BUT, in the seller hub, under "Promotional Offers" is "Additional Fixed Price Free Insertions in Select Categories" of 10,000 items - my stuff is in the "select category" group.  (Why my Basic Store subscription listing fees appears in this block is a different question).  I am pretty sure this 10,000 item promotion has been there for at least a year, but, over the decades, "promotions" come and go without notice.

If I go to the trouble of creating a 3,000 item store of good-til-cancelled listings, the sudden disappearance of this "promotion" will cause the automatic roll-over several thousand items that will suddenly be charged listing fees - dwarfing any possible profits from selling anything.  Assuming the Basic Store keeps its original 1,000 "free" listings, 2,000 @ $0.25 is $500.00 per month of surprise new costs (versus the $20/month store fee).

I REALLY don't want to have to monitor this "promotion" every day.  As a retired programmer, I will have a handy File Exchange batch capability to "cancel" 2,000 or 3,000 items depending on the level of surprise, but I do not want to live in fear. 

What I am looking for it the way of response to this post is "official" reassurance the there are no plans to remove this "promotion", or, that, if is going to happen, there will be good (CLEAR) advance notice.  I am 100% certain that if the promotion goes away, so does my store.

[nobody*s_perfect]

It's called a promotion but it's part of the basic fee structure for Stores.  All of the monthly free insertions are called "promotions;" it's just eBay jargon.

Changes in the fee structure of stores are announced well in advance as part of the semi-annual Spring and Fall seller updates, so you'd have plenty of notice to end the listings before an expensive rollover. Over the past several years, eBay has been steadily increasing the free insertions available to all sellers, so IMHO the likelihood of a significant decrease is very low.

[ducks2k]

@nobody - thanks for the reassurance.  "Jargon" makes sense, but I am still not 100% confident with your explanation.

In the past, I was very focused on auctions, and frequently (multiple times per year) a "promotion" would show up for additional free auction listings for hundreds or thousands of items.  I took advantage of many of them, but, at some point, they just stopped showing up.  Have not seen any in years, but I don't spend a lot of time bringing up the seller hub just to check.  I'm pretty sure that the old "promotions" were accompanied by an email, but I haven't seen any of those in years, either.  I read the Spring/Fall Seller Updates, but they tend to say things like "fee changes" rather than providing explicit change detail, and its relevance to me, personally.

Building a sensible store is a lot of work - both design and implementation.  A couple of other forum threads I have been working on recently have pointed out current store defects (and just plain mysteries).  I "feel" like the time is close for me to build a large sensible store, but I don't want to waste time if there are clear gotchas.

There are many things I have "learned" over the years that just are not true any more and I don't want to go down a lot of dead-end alleys.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@ducks2k  The answer you received is correct. Sure, ebay can change fees, but we are ALL subject to that change. And, while ebay is not very good at announcing all types of changes in advance, FEE changes ---changes to the fee structure, store subscriptions, etc----DO get advance notice. The word "Promotional Offers" is a legacy term----at this point, if you go to the help pages and look up info on store subscriptions, you'll see those fees are now baked into the subscription price.

So, yes, the fee structure could change. But No, these aren't like the old promotional listing fees, which came and went and were usually for short durations. 

[nobody*s_perfect]

The decline of short-term special offers has accompanied the increase in regular monthly free insertions.  I suspect that data about usage of the short-term offers was used when eBay was deciding how to revise the regular ongoing store free insertions.

The seller updates always have links that describe the upcoming changes in detail; sometimes you have to dig down through "Learn more" etc. but advance notice is definitely provided. 

Every eBay store seller has gone through the same thought process that you are now undertaking. There's just no way for us to know how many others decided not to follow through, and here on the user discussion board we surely have no secret insights into whatever eBay might be planning in the long run.  If you are wary, then you should sign up for a month-to-month subscription so you can easily back out if things don't work out.

[regpata69]

---

@ducks2k wrote:

I am 50% stamp collector, 50% stamp dealer and 50% computer programmer.

---

1/3'rd stamp collector, 1/3'rd stamp dealer and 1/3'rd computer programmer.
There, it's fixed.

[ducks2k]

@nobody*s_perfect  I have had a "store" subscription for many years.  It was the only rational way to get a decent number of "free" insertions.  The decision now is whether to go through the work of creating an actual "store" to attempt to sell fixed price stamps to collectors.

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques  - thanks for pointing out that the 10,000 ARE documented in the general fee documentation.  It was just the use of the word "promotion" which I had only really noticed as it applied to truly transient free auction listings.

As per our other conversations, I am making progress with a rational store organization that would work for 3,000 listings shoehorned into 300 Store Categories.  Other than the glitchy way the the store displays actually work at the moment, the one BIG problem is that within any (or all) Store Categories, individual listing appear in random order.  ALL of the dropdown sorts are oriented to non-store searches, and "best match" has virtually no meaning in a store context.  Can you imagine going into a grocery store and finding the shelves organized by "recently displayed" or "priced low to high".  Those have some minor relevance to store shopping, but are fundamentally irrelevant, and "random" is even less relevant.

This one needs fixing immediately.  (quickest code patch would be to define "best match" in a store context as "alphabetical by item title").  The item title is something the seller has control over, and that the buyer can scan.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@ducks2k  I can understand your desire for alphabetical, but I don't think ebay will ever make alphabetical the default. I think there may be a slim---very slim--- possibility that ebay would add it to the search order options, but never the default. I was on  Zoom call last year with some of the stores team, and tried to convince them (among other things) that the seller should be able to set the default order (newly listed, best match etc) and display (gallery/listing) for his own store. They were very clear that all their data showed Best Match converted better than any other sort, and if the buyer wanted another sort, it was readily available in the drop down.

I would focus on creating strong categories , rather than hoping for alphabetical search order. 

[ducks2k]

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques   Wow!!!  **bleep**???  -- with my programmer hat on, I can see a hesitancy to mess with the search code - it is fundamental to the way they organize and quickly access a few billion items.

But, really...  The current default in Stores is "best match", and I can't deduce what it might possibly be "best matching".  Every way I look at my listings, I see rows of 4 RANDOM items in the selected store category.  When dropping back higher in the tree of Store Categories, it is still RANDOM.  I do not see any correlation with any item field - price/listing date/StoreCategory/anything....

In the real world stores are not organized randomly, and each buyer walking in does not get to change what the store owner thinks is the proper organization.  Different stores are organized differently, and for different reasons, but it is still non-random.

I can't believe that eBay management made an actual decision that random is better....  Even if I was allowing that the thought process might be to insert "sponsored" items into a search result to improve eBay revenue, it just doesn't apply to stores.

It doesn't have to be organized "alphabetically by title" -- that just seems sensible to me -- just organized somehow under seller control.  It is fine to let buyers change the organization via search if they wish, but the default can't just be RANDOM.  Yes, it might take some actual new code, but really...............

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@ducks2k  When I walk into a typical store , things aren't arranged alphabetically. There is what I would consider the equivalent of online store categories: groceries over here, clothing over here, electronics here....In a typical grocery store, for example, we also have the end caps, which are a bit like Best Match...or maybe using the new store homepage "rows" to promote whatever the seller wants to promote. Stuff may look like it appears randomly on this end caps, but the grocer has decided to give those items prominence because he expects they will sell well. (And, very possibly, because the manufacturer has paid extra for that placement. The cereal aisle isn't alphabetical where I shop, and whether a box is at eye level or consigned to the bottom shelf may look random, but isn't.)

You sell in a very tight niche. Many of us do not. How do I benefit with alphabet order? I sell a large variety of stuff. Many very different items have titles that begin with "V"---because Vintage is the first word in the title. And consider sellers with literally 10,000 items, very different items....the alphabet isn't a very helpful sort order.....if someone wants something very specific, they can do a search in the store. 

And keep in mind that two very different types of buyers come to my store. I may get a searcher...someone looking for something specific. He can narrow his search by category, or just use search itself (and there are left hand side filters to further narrow his search.) He doesn't need alphabetical order. Then there are browsers. This is someone who just wants to look around, see if something catches his eye. He certainly doesn't need alphabetical order.

Best Match may look entirely random to you, but it is based on an algo. What you see and what I see might not be the same, especially if we have buying and search histories ebay can tap into. But whether you like Best Match or not, ebay will tell you their internal data shows that Best Match converts better than any other search order....that means a buyer looking at Best Match is MORE likely to buy than one looking at another search order. In fact, that's the whole point of Best Match---to try to increase the likelihood that a buyer will buy.

ebay is going to do what it believes---based on its internal data---works best. Believe me, I tried to convince them to give the seller the option of deciding the default for his own store. Obviously, they were unconvinced. Maybe they'll change that at some point. But I doubt it. My advice to you: Work within what ebay provides, don't spend you time trying to tell ebay what it "should" do. Instead, do your best to optimize with what ebay provides. Think about the people who are very successful with SEO on Google. They don't spend their time trying to tell Google here's how you ought to do this. They study how Google actually works and they optimize for that.

[ducks2k]

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques-- I am willing to grant most of what you say, bu unless eBay is willing to document what "best match" means in a store context, it should not be the default store organization.  Algorithms have definitions - I cannot deduce what this one means in a StoreCategory context.

If you and I decide to agree that a "StoreCategory" tree has its equivalent in a grocery store, then, yes, the "Baking Goods" isle contains a "Baking Flour" category with a reasonable leaf category number of "Wheat Flour" items.  No, they are not arranged in alphabetical order, but they ARE arranged as the store owner chooses, which might appear random to the buyer, but probably is not.    That said, the analogy kind-of breaks down in that the product items carry their own branding/logos that might be significant.  Also, all grocery stores are organized in a similar fashion because of decades of store organizing experience and comparisons.  The buyer knows what to expect when he walks into the store.

I fundamentally disagree that eBay made conscious decisions about store organization based on sales metrics.  If the store owners have no tools to display their items in the order they choose, and (in the Stamp Collecting area) NONE of the big sellers has made any attempt to use nested store categories, even with tens of thousands of items -- it is impossible to collect relevant sales metrics about store performance.  If I do hot have the capability to organize my individual items, how can the metrics say that item organization is not important?

As far as I can tell, Ebay Stores are "See Seller's other items" with the exact same search capabilities as the rest of the website, except that they only return items from the one seller.  The reason that sellers in my area are not utilizing stores is that there is little value added for a lot of additional work.

The general website item SORTS fundamentally apply to choosing between different seller offerings for the same (or equivalent) product items.  Within a single seller store, different sorts make more sense.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

As I said, I actually spoke with the Stores team....I urged them to give us the ability to choose the default for our own stores. Maybe, at some point, they will do that. But at the time I spoke with them, they definitely gave the impression that was not on their radar. I did not suggest other sort orders, but again, I doubt it is on their radar. You are welcome to contact ebay and try to convince them to do it the way you want it. You might be successful. 

In the meantime---and this is my main point---none of this really matters because it is not the present reality you or I have to deal with. You can either choose not to go the store route at all....because the design does not achieve the goal you believe it should achieve...or you can turn your focus to working within the design as it actually exists.

I believe stores are a work-in-progress. I don't know what changes to expect to see this year, but as I have said repeatedly in other threads, we may at least get some hints on March 10th, and you might have an opportunity (if you attend) to make your suggestions there. BUT.....right now.....you can either work with the existing structure and optimize it as best you can, or not. 

As I've also said, I am not at all satisfied with my present category structure, but I'm not even going to try to change it until I know where they are going with categories and the listing frame. 

[ducks2k]

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques Thank you for your thoughts, and I was not challenging you to solve my problems, really just expressing frustration that the situation is, as we see it now. 

Of course, I have the option to store or not to store, but my frustration is that I have to figure out what the current code does and doesn't do by trial and error, rather than reading some documentation.

There are some amazingly odd aspects of the existing code.  For example,clicking to the store gets the buyer to the store home page which consists of an odd banner space and a clickable box that lets me "Shop by Store Category" and I can pick one of the top level categories.  This will display the first page of whatever category is chosen - with NO category navigation block, but with a "See All" button at the end of the listing page.  If I scroll to the bottom of this screen, I get to click on "See All". 

Clicking on "See All" brings up what has been referred to as a "page frame" which gives access to the 3 level Store Category Structure.  But, until a buyer clicks on the "See All" button, he has no inkling that there even is a nested category structure.  If buyers are supposed to be able to shop by category, that page frame should be immediately and permanently available from the store home page.

Clicking on an individual item in the store does insert an odd subset of store categories into the item listing itself, near the description.  Not bad, but not consistent.

I think I will have to use the "About this store" page to describe the tortured navigation techniques available.  I have no idea if any buyer would be able to figure this out by exploration alone.

I still have not analyzed how StoreCategory2 can be utilized sensibly.  It "feels" like something akin to doing a search of a StoreCategory(1) return, but I would quickly run out of 300 categories if I attempted to implement it as an independent category tree.  I will have to see what actually works.

I have most of my listing tool code working, so my next step will be to populate a store of 1,000 or so items and see what it looks like.  I have a few collector friends who will try putting things into a cart  and see how navigable the store is.  They are well used to scouting for things on eBay, so their feedback will be useful.

The real question will be if buyers with cash find it useful....

The fact that I am "arguing" with you does not mean that I do not appreciate your insights very much.  Thank you so much for your time.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@ducks2k  Well, you are absolutely correct in thinking that you should take the time to understand how the store is set up, and what options you have or don't have. Most sellers never take the time to do that.

One question: have you actually tried to edit your store? There isn't a whole lot you can do (at least so far, as I've said, they may be adding more features), but I've been reading all your posts and I'm not clear whether you have actually ever clicked on the button in the top right hand corner of your store, the one that says something like "Manage My Store"--- 

[jhr-4800]

Now.  Be ready to pay 15% on fees.  I am prepare to pay 20%, including fees.  eBay is the cheapest platform to sale.  Look around.  Poshmark, you pay 20%, and buyer pays for shipping and taxes.  Other platforms are charging the same.  I am telling you this because I have tried the other selling places.  Any way, at the end its your decision to make.  Good luck on your selling journey.