Pricing Changes, 30 day listing and Increased Visibility to Shop Listings

[sapana@ebay.com]

Dear Members

At eBay.in, it has been our constant endeavor to improve buyer experience by providing great deals across a wide variety of products and helping buyers find them quickly. Along with this, we are also committed to providing our sellers an unmatched business platform that rewards quality products and good customer service with increased product visibility and sales.

In the last one year, some of the steps we have taken towards the same are more attractive deals for buyers, inclusion of larger number of sellers in promotions, marketing campaigns and use of eBay coupons to increase buyer transactions. With the intent of further improving overall buyer experience and to ensure inclusive growth for all sellers, we are making the following changes to the fees on eBay.in

Changes to Listing Fee Max Cap: Last year in July, the Listing Fee Max Cap was introduced with the intent of enabling our sellers to display their entire inventory in a cost effective manner. This pricing structure was successful in certain categories, while in others it caused an imbalance which impacted visibility of products. This in turn led to a bad finding experience for buyers. Thus to balance visibility for all listings, following fees will be applicable for sellers listing more than 1500 listings in a calendar month.

1. All listings in all categories, created and scheduled to go live on or after 00:00:01 IST on 16th September 2009, will be subject to the new pricing structure
2. Listings for a duration of 1 and 3 days will be charged Re. 1 irrespective of category they are listed in (excluding Books & Magazines, Movie & Music, Video & Computer games)
3. The max cap benefits will continue to be computed on seller’s listings in a calendar month.
4. The discounted fee above 1500 listings in a calendar month shall be charged during the listing process and credited back within 30 days of the end of the calendar month
5. For sellers listing less than 1500 listings in a calendar month, the fee continues to remain Re.1 per listing
6. Final Value Fee for all categories remains the same, subject to minimum Rs. 3.

Introduction of 30 day Fixed Price (Buy it Now) listing duration for all sellers in addition to the current 3,5,7 and 10 day listing duration. We believe this new listing duration will allow sellers to display their slow moving items over a longer period of time, without having to re-list the items multiple times.

href="http://pages.ebay.in/marketplace/marketplace_changes.html#3">Click here to see the details of listing & feature fees for the 30 day fixed price format.

Greater value for shop sellers: With introduction of 30 day duration listing, all shop listings will become part of fixed price listings and will enjoy increased visibility in core search results. Good ‘Til Cancelled format will continue to remain available only for shop listings. Shop listings will also get discounted listing and feature fees.

href="http://pages.ebay.in/marketplace/marketplace_changes.html#3">Click here to see the discounted fee for shop listings. Given the increased benefits for shop sellers, the revised shop subscription fee shall be as follows.


 The new 30 day fixed price format will be available from 10th September 2009. The revised listing fee on the 30 day fixed price format, changes in Feature fees and Shop subscription fees shall be effective on all listings created or scheduled to go live on or after 00:00:01 IST on 10th September 2009.


Which sellers will be impacted?
 All sellers listing in all categories on eBay India
 Sellers who have listed more than 20 listings on eBay since their time of registration on eBay, will be charged Listing Fees.
 Sellers who are creating their 20th listing or less than the 20th listing on eBay from the time of registration will not be charged the new listing fees.

How do the changes impact a seller?
We understand that our sellers will need to make changes to their current business plan to accommodate the above mentioned changes. To understand the impact of the above changes on your business, we encourage you to read our FAQ section.

We also encourage you to use our Customer Support Resources to understand how this change will impact your business and discuss your options for adjusting your eBay selling strategy. You can also reach out to your Category manager or your Account manager to understand the changes and incorporate them in your business.

To help understand the changes better, to discuss various aspects of selling on eBay or to give feedback, please join the Open House discussion with Muralikrishnan B. – Director, Product & Category Management on this thread on 1st September, 4 PM.

Regards,
eBay Team

[Anonymous]

Dear Devesh (veedeedirect)

Thanks for your comments

With respect to your point on the Listing fee above the 1500 limit being too low, it is our belief that the Community of eBay sellers, with the right kind of pricing structure would be able to provide a wide variety of products to our buyers

The intent of increasing the Listing fee to a nominal 50 paisa per listing purely is to ensure that sellers focus on listing items that have a potential to sell rather than adopting strategies (like multiple listings) that negatively impact the overall vibrancy of the marketplace

At the same time, we are also cognizant that for our large sellers, this could be big change (from a cost perspective) and thus we wanted to continue with a pricing structure that would enable our large sellers to list their entire inventory on site (and actually grow that on a continuous basis thanks to their excellent product sourcing skills)

Such a quantum jump in the Listing fees (beyond 1500 listings) - to Rs 5 per listing as you had suggested would have acted to the detriment of our goal of having the widest possible variety on site

Further, I would like to reiterate our goal of rebalancing the pricing on eBay.in to be more backloaded (in terms of FVF & PaisaPay fees) rather than front load (Listing fees). That way, we ensure that our incentives are aligned better with those of our sellers. The pricing change done in July 2008 was a big move in this direction

Best regards
Murali

[indiabigbaazar]

Hi

I also believe that the listing fees limit should be maximum by 1500 Rs. per month in the tech category.

This new change can demotivate sellers to list more and more new products, as if sales is not assured for each and every listings.

I think the old policy was better.

thanks

[Anonymous]

Dear Harsh (harshcorp05), anand_online and indiabigbaazar

Regarding your point of sellers in the Technology category wanting to list a larger inventory on site and the related impact on their Listing fees and thus margins, I would like to point out that we have increased the Listing fees in Technology categories beyond the 1500 limit to a very nominal 50 paisa only per listing. Further, for slower moving inventory, we would strongly encourage you to use the 30 Day fixed price format which is available at just 1Re (for the 30 day duration) - implying a 25 paisa a week listing fee. That said, do remember that our FVF for Technology categories is ONLY 1%


Best regards,
Murali

[snrama]

Hi Murali & Sapana,

Its nice to see you on a workshop after a longtime. There are many changes going on at eBay.

Firstly the Listing view, PaisaPay Refund Option and etc..

Now, Pricing Changes, 30 day listing and Increased Visibility to Shop Listings & Global EasyBuy.

I don't thing that the Removing the 1500 Maximum Cap benefits to seller like me.

I deal with most of the branded products like SONY, Kingston, SteelSeries, Sandisk and many other brands.. We upload a minimum of 5 listing for each unique product

For 300 unique products x 5 listings = Around 6000 listings per month. Its certainly not profitable for me if I don't get good sales.

If PaisaPay charges are reduced (i.e OBT for 1.5% and credit cards for 3%), then atleast sellers can recover the expenses.

Global EasyBuy: I liked this option. Buyers can purchase internationally through PaisaPay. ---------------
With Regards,
Navaneeth (snrama) 😉

[anand_online]

If the max cap is increased then it will definitely affect our profitability, we might not even think of listing items which are very slow moving but sells, its very difficult to pin point all those items, we should be given a chance to list all items with some way or other.
Suggestions:
1. Reduce the duplicate listings to bare minimum ( may be 1-2) , now the rule of allowing 10 duplicate listings is not good for site.
2. Increase the Max cap to 2000 - 2500/- , this is due to fact that its very difficult to maintain the details of all products and its closing time vis a vis listing fees, when to list , what to list how many times list in a month, its not possible to maitain these records.
3. Ways to find that if the seller does not have any duplicate listings , then the Max cap of 1500/- should continue.
MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO AVOID OR FINISH ALL DUPLICATE LISTINGS BY ANY SELLER, DUPLICATE LISTINGS DOES NOT GIVE ADVATAGE TO ANY BUYER.

[Anonymous]

Dear Umang Midha (indconcepts)

Regarding your point on Shops becoming unviable for new sellers, A Shop bring multiple benefits to our sellers. namely :

* Lower Listing fee for the 30 day FP duration (with greater visibility on core search results)
* Lower Feature (Listing upgrade) fees which can be leveraged to gain even more visibility
* Free Selling Manager (or Selling Manager Pro) - depending on the Shop subscription tier which provides multiple features to more efficiently manage & grow your business on eBay.in
* A dedicated URL for your Shop online that you could use in various Marketing / Promotional material
* Markdown manager feature to run discount sale promotions exclusively in your store
* Email marketing feature that you could effectively use to market to your existing buyer base and increase repeat buyers

Thus, we would strongly urge our sellers to not view Shop subscription fees in isolation, but rather look at the overall set of benefits one gains from the Shop

Best regards,
Murali

[Anonymous]

Dear originalgoods

Regarding your suggestion on eBay negotiating with courier companies to provide discounted rates to our sellers, this is something we have done in the past but had met with limited success because large courier companies are unwilling to provide attractive rates if they need to invoice each seller separately

Further, if this negotiated rate is optional for sellers, the negotiating leverage is limited because in any such commercial negotiation the vendor would always seek some kind of volume guarantees (which we would not be able to provide if this is optional for sellers)

That said, reducing the friction in Shipping (for both Buyers & Sellers) and ensuring lower costs / better service levels from courier is something we believe is important and are in the process of evaluating options on this front

Best Regards
Murali

[harshcorp05]

Hi,

Same here sir around 1000 Unique listings X 5 = 20000 Listings per month.

Profits would certainly vanish in listing fees instead slabs also can be given to sellers according to the total sales they do like a seller does so and so sales he is eligible for the max cap limit provided the multiple listings policy is not taken advantage of.

REGARDS
HARSH TANNA

[bagsworld]

I had mentioned about slabs for max cap in my prev post. The structure could be something like this..

0 - 1500 = 1500
1500-3000= Rs. X fees
3000-6000= Rs. Y fees
6000-10000= Rs. Z fees

[anand_online]

Is there any difference is selling principle for various categories, why Jewellery is expempted for fees after max cap of 1500/-, media categories are totally exempted, but for this category 6% FVF charges is quite high.
We do listings in Media / technology. We get better response in technology products as we are keeping a low margins but with 6% FVF in media category , we can't offer discount to buyer and normally sell items on MRP, which does not attract buyers. Reducing of this 6% FVF for video games also should be considered.