ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
Regards,
@Anonymous
GTC scheduled end
Can we toss around the idea of a "scheduled end" feature similar to a "scheduled start"? The hardest aspect of ending listings under GTC format is being online at the right moment to end the listings when a short duration is an important strategy. I think a large number of sellers will do just fine switching to GTC, but there are still sellers who want to manage their listings differently, and who will have difficulty catching or missing the rollover times when managing fees.
Free or Fee?
A "scheduled start" used to cost ten cents and is now free. If a fee were attached to a "scheduled end", I doubt that it would solve the problem for sellers who are trying to avoid fees by staying under their free insertion limits. Would a small fee be tolerable in lieu of babysitting rollover dates?
Of course, if the fee structure were different for rollovers, maybe those sellers wouldn't care when their listings ended.
Promo Issues:
All sellers get 50 free insertions. When eBay offers 100 free as a promo, small sellers may now be reluctant to take advantage of the promo if they know they have to watch the end date to avoid fees after the free period expires. But of course, that is how all "free trials" work. If you forget to cancel, charges begin, and that is the marketing strategy behind offering them.
Problems with a Scheduled End:
Would an "ending soonest" search show the original rollover date or the "scheduled end" date? Would the feature be abused by revising the end date often? Instead of allowing a calendar, would allowing the end to occur only at a 30-day cycle resolve that issue?
Automation Rule:
What about an "automation rule" that says "run once and then end", or that says "run to end of this cycle", as an override on GTC? Would that address the concerns of most sellers who have complained of losing control?
Thank you for those store corrections. I have no store experience, so the info is valuable.
A store subscription GETS CHARGED 10 CENTS to schedule a start time.
"If I have a $25 Basic Store, and list 250 items, each costs me 10 cents.
If I only list 200 items each costs me 12.5 cents."
And for completeness, a non-store owner who lists 200 with 50 free would pay $52 per month, or 26 cents per listing.
Yes, conforming the billing/subscription cycle length to the insertion cycle length would definitely resolve those periods where a seller is billed twice in one invoice period and where free insertions are lost due to that cycle mismatch.
Then there are the sellers who want to manually control product rotation, and perhaps stay under their free allocations.
"My suggestion is to give us a compromise, do a 60 or 90 day fixed listing."
Would an automation rule solve that? "End after n cycles"?
"The closest to reasonable explanation is a stable item number/url for use outside of ebay. This way there are no broken links. While this seems reasonable, there really is no reason ebay can't just make a relist use the same item number/url."
Good question. I wonder if eBay could reuse the URL? Perhaps there is more to the reason than just SEO.
I just realized why eBay can not reuse the same Item number on a relist. If the listing ended with a sale, there would be an identifier conflict when the seller uses "relist" to sell-similar. eBay would need to implement a flag that would change the meaning of "relist" if an item from a short-term listing was sold and then relisted vs a relist of an unsold item. This change in meaning would need to propagate through all the eBay and third-party listing tools. Snarly problem and ripe for problems.
I don't believe eBay needs to convert any FP coding. As each FP listing ends, it will be pointed to a GTC format, if and when it relists, and the FP code becomes an artifact. That part should be fairly clean with no entanglement.
To your question, I don't believe changing the GTC cycle from 30 to 31 days should be difficult unless there are other dependencies that are hardcoded into tools and modules across the site, like perhaps the 60-day and 90-day visibility seen in eBay tools. Catching unforeseen dependencies could be a problem for awhile, but would mostly be a housekeeping problem.
All the third-party tools will have to catch up to the changes as well.
A 31-day cycle would certainly resolve the issues surrounding lost free insertions when two cycles start in the same month.
With a 30-day cycle, a listing started on Jan 1 would renew on Jan 31, skip Feb entirely, and renew on Mar 2. Occasionally, months with 31 days would see two cycles starting in the same month.
Conversely, with a 31-day cycle, every so often a 30-day billing month will be skipped entirely and can be used to insert more listings in that month, but only for one cycle if trying to maintain the same fees.
We can see that a 30 day cycle more closely matches the calendar than a 31 day cycle that would result in a net shift of 12 days lost in ebay revenue for 12 cycles.
12 x 30 = 360 with 5 days left over (ebay makes money for 5 days)
12 x 31 = 372 with 7 days over shoot (ebay loses money for 7 days)
11 x 31 = 341 with 24 days left over
@
@fabreedwar wrote:Don't the sellers that opt for GTC listings right now already have the issue with possible double relistings in the same month? I suppose they are okay with it, as I never see any threads complaining about this (although I suppose I could have missed them). At least there hasn't been the uproar that is going on presently.
Anyway, I sure don't want to get hit with a second listing fee in the same month for an item that is listed/relisted on May 1 and then relisted again on May 31.
I think ebay should add code that lets an item be listed/relisted only once per calendar month. I also think ebay should delay this rollout until they can do this. This seem a much better way to deal with this problem, vice sellers en masse cancelling items on day 29.
I am sure through trial and error they figured it out but I am sure eBay has made a haul in fees over time with that learning curve ... with over 25 MILLION Selling IDs you can't tell me they didn't make any money. For me the issue is simple, had they included a Fee Waiver with that "early" announcement then it would NOT have been about generating revenue from fees ... but they didn't so it is and there's not too much more to say about it ...
