Sellers,
We continuously strive to create the best possible experience for you, taking into account the critical feedback we receive from our community. As you saw in today’s Seller Update, we’ve made several improvements that are meant to help drive your business. These include introducing enhancements to growth and marketing tools, giving buyers more ways to pay, and making it easier to relist returns. In addition, we’ve taken steps to bolster seller protections, and we’ll continue to make further improvements in this area this year.
We’ve also announced that we will move to calendar-month renewals for Good ‘Til Cancelled (GTC) listings. This is a very important change, and one that originated largely in part due to your direct feedback.
Before jumping into the details of calendar-month renewals, I’d like to remind you of the rationale for making all fixed price listings GTC. Our intent in making this change is to drive sales conversion and to ensure that the best, most relevant listings appear in search, regardless of when or how they were created. As mentioned last month, we’ve seen that GTC listings realize tremendous SEO benefits that help to grow and keep interested buyers, thereby improving the likelihood of a sale.
The shift to GTC was not done to make listing management more difficult or to collect more money in the form of renewal fees. However, we have seen sellers express concern about managing GTC listings and how their renewal dates align with monthly entitlements and promotions. With the current 30-day schedule, listings can shift from renewing at the beginning of the month, to renewing at the end of the month, or they can even renew on both the 1st and 31st of certain months.
By moving to a calendar-month schedule, your listings will renew only once in July, once in August, and once per calendar month thereafter. If a listing is created at the beginning of the month, it will always renew at the beginning of the month. If a listing is created at the end of the month, it will always renew at the end of the month. Listings, on average, will end up with more than 30 days per renewal cycle. Listings will now go through fewer renewals per year, equating to less renewal fees paid by sellers. In all, this should make it easier for you to know when your listings will renew next, make it easier to manage your inventory by aligning with monthly billing cycles and promotions, and ultimately reduce the number of fees you pay to eBay.
A few additional callouts:
- Duration is an important factor in helping sales conversion. Conversion can often take more than 30 days, and GTC listings provide oftentimes needed exposure in the marketplace. Putting aside seasonal items that you may choose to list for a fixed period of time, you should want your other listings to stay active to maintain SEO and “watchers” in the marketplace.
- The “Start Date” column in conjunction with the “Time Left” column will allow you to easily rank listings that are scheduled to renew, or listings that have been in the marketplace the longest, to more easily help with managing your inventory.
- You can pause a GTC listing by using the Out-of-Stock feature and setting the listing quantity to zero. Any listing that is out-of-stock for more than a calendar month will be eligible for an insertion fee credit. Any listing that is out-of-stock for 90 consecutive days will automatically cease to renew.
- Best Offer, Seller Initiated Offers, and Promoted Listings are powerful tools that when used in conjunction with GTC fixed priced listings help drive conversion. We have added the ability to filter active listings that have Best Offer enabled or are Promoted and easily bulk edit them. You can now also send bulk Seller Initiated Offers on multiple listings to multiple buyers at once.
Please refer to the GTC Update FAQ should you need any additional information. I hope this update has helped to clarify concerns or questions about the transition to Good ‘Til Cancelled fixed price listings.
Thank you for your continued partnership and feedback.
Harry
