We anticipated a screwing of the sellers by eBay with the upcoming "spring update". We closed our store at the end of January, ended all of our listings, transferred them to other sites and stocked up on KY jelly for the anual eBay screwing (not really on the KY). I have to say, we were a bit worried at first because we've been selling here since 2002. But............... the other sites, with LOWER fees actually have been a blessing in disguise!!! It took a couple of weeks, but after that, we were able to maintain our sales level, but most importantly, we were able to INCREASE our overall Net return by only having to pay a 3%-5% fee charged by those sites as compared to eBay's 9.15% or 10%. Mathematically it did not make sense to us to continue to pay for a yearly Premium store subscription, when the only benefit from that is a .85% reduced fee rate (9.15% vs 10%) . That .85% "savings" equates to a whopping $85 per $10,000 in sales. Now, if you generate almost 85K a year in total annual sales, then the .85% difference makes sense because the savings you would see in final value fees would be equal to that of a yearly Premium store subscription. If you do anything LESS than that amount, then you have to decide if it's worth it or not. Sure, there are the 500 free listings, but we typically don't list more than 200 items a month except for during the holiday season. Anything above 50 free listings is billed at a .35 listing fee for a max of 30 days (another site has a 4 month listing duration of .20, with no forced auto relisting and only 5% in fees). At .35 per listing for anything above the 50 free, if we would list an additional 170 listings that would equal our "monthly subscription fee" for the store.
eBay actually counts on people and small businesses to just trust them blindly and not run the numbers for themselves. This forced GTC format actually reduces the value of your item listed by the amount of the listing fee each month (if you don't have or pay for a store and have to pay to list it). After 12 months, your $25 item is now worth $20.80 (assuming a .35 listing fee each month). Now, let's say it cost $5 to ship, your total Gross for the sale is $30. Take off $3 for ebay fees, 2.5% for Paypal would be .75, $5 for shipping and the $4.20 it cost to list it GTC for 12 months. Your NET return would be a whole $17.05..... 31.8% LESS than what you had it listed for!!! Yaaaaayyyy. It doesn't really matter the cost of the item that's listed, the Percentage doesn't change, ie; you'd make $68.20 on a $100 listing using the same scenario. Now, when you factor in the fact that eBay Throttles listings, seasonal times/markets, supply & demand, to us, it really didn't seem worth it any longer to keep our store. We will continue to sell here, but in very limited quantities.
