First off, i think its a WONDERFUL idea to ban sellers from leaving feedback. 99.9999% of sellers wait until the buyer leaves feedback for them before they leave feedback. The reason,,if the buyer didnt like the way the transaction went down, they can retaliate. I bought something on ebay a while back and the seller charged me for insurance they didnt buy for the shipping. I emailed and never heard back, I left bad feedback warning other buyers. The seller flat out lied and left feedback saying "hobbible buyer - do not sell to"

As far as the rate increase goes, build it into your "handling costs" many of those power sellers rip people off with "shipping and handling" You buy a book or DVD the post office will ship for $4bucks and the seller charges $10 or more for shipping and handling. Ebay buyers can see all the costs of everything, so they can decide what to bid on and what to avoid. The sellers can add the extra .30 cents into their handling fees and stop crying. Ebay does have a bit of a monopoly going here, so its good there is a bit of a shake up, but the sellers are the ones who pass the costs on to the buyers anyway, ebay just takes a cut along the way,,you can decide to bid or not

My wife is an active eBay seller with several items listed there right now. She doesn't have a particular problem with the fee changes... we saw it coming.

What does bother her is that right now she has four individual "sales" which are awaiting payment from the buyers and it looks as if she'll get stood up on payment for all four items. If that happens, she won't be able to tag those buyers as deadbeats because the new feedback rules are just plain stupid.

I have been selling on eBay for 2 years and I have completed over 1000 transactions. I have received 4 negative feedbacks from customers, not one of them contacted me before posting a negative feedback. How can you possible correct a problem if they do not let you know something is wrong? I did return a negative feedback to those customers due to their lack of communication skills. If eBay wants to view that as retaliatory, that's their choice!
My auction description begins with "Communication is key!" Honestly how would eBay have ever become the giant they are without communication between the buyer and seller. The new feedback rule eliminates a sellers voice.
EBay’s press release stating they were lowering sellers fees was deceptive to stock holders and sellers. Basically the lowered the listing 5 cents on the front tend only to raise a selling final value fee from 5% to 8.75%.
Unless eBay reduces the FVF back to 5%, and changes the new feedback rule, I am gone!
I have already signed up at Ruby Lane and iOffer. I will be selling on these sites, and possible other sites even if eBay does nothing to their changes. Sellers who are still listing, and ones who may list again after the end of the week will be looking for other sites.
The recent changes has damaged sellers trust in eBay that will more than likely prove to be unrepairable.

I just don't know where to start. There are many new changes, some tie together into cause and effects that the eBay unaware cannot understand. I will take one change and let you follow me.

After 9 years of selling on eBay I have 100% positive feedback. I do not threaten or hold my buyers hostage. They like me, I like them & it has worked very nicely. I am not a big volume seller, but I do depend on eBay very much to make ends meet. Let's pretend that all buyers are perfect and I do not have to worry about a scam buyer out to take advantage of the fact that I can no longer 'tag' him as a scam buyer and look at the changes behind the one that has everyone all fired up. Feedback.
Feedback will no longer be cumulative taking in your entire seller history, it will be the prior 12 months only, my 9 years of excellent service mean nothing. Selling low volume as I do, one unhappy buyer or perhaps several 'satisfied' buyers put me in jeopardy of:
~Having my Paypal account frozen for 21 days. Yet I am still required to pay for shipping and ship any items out of my own pocket. I do not receive any part of the interest Paypal is drawing on my frozen funds.
~Being dropped to the lowest in search rankings or not being in search rankings at all. In other words, I can post 100 thingy bobbys, but should someone search for 'thingy bobbys' they will never see any of mine. I have paid eBay to allow me to list an item which no one will ever see.
~The new beta testing auction pages the unaware can't see just yet have a warning to prospective buyers in bright red that I am not to be trusted. This waring in bright red is shown if a seller has less than a 4.3 in any of the categories a buyer rates them on after a sale. Just a for instance, if you bought a thingy bobby from me and I sent it to you, these are the approximate choices eBay will give you to rate me in 4 different categories.
1 star = Extremely dissatisfied
2 stars = Dissatisfied
3 stars = Neither satisfied or dissatisfied
4 stars = Satisfied
5 stars = Extremely satisfied
Still following me? If you are satisfied and tell eBay so by giving me 4 stars, you have just put a huge red warning on all my auctions that I am a bad seller, given them a reason to hold my money for 3 weeks, and knocked me out of the search engine. I see you shaking your head that I must be exaggerating. No, I am not. Do the homework before you make assumptions, we are not whiny children making a fuss over nothing. We are businessmen and women who are rebelling against a monopoly who has taken our money for years (sellers pay eBay, no buyer has ever given eBay a penny) and is now attempting to push us out in order to court huge mega-sellers.

I am done.

eBay will lose more market share and value due to the upcoming changes. The "boycott" will have little effect at all and eBay will brush it off as if it doesn't matter. The price changes will force sellers of many items to sell on other sites or their own website exclusively. The feedback change is the most detrimental of all. It will gradually erode the reputations of both good sellers and bad sellers alike until buyers no longer have the ability to differentiate. The buyers' willingness to pay a fair price will recede and/or they just won't buy anymore on eBay. The millions of eBay buyers are accustomed to seeing certain levels of feedback for a seller to be considered "good". Buyers' expecations won't change, but sellers' feedback will become lower across the board.

The changes will also allow a multitude of other problems to arise, including the enabling of unscrupulous sellers to sabotage their competition.

In addition, eBay's "Best Match", their continued stiffling of competition from Google Checkout and new policies aimed at forcing new users to accept PayPal will expose eBay to lawsuits.

In my opinion, eBay stock is a loser and will decline further. The best bet for eBay shareholders would be to dump it now or wait until it drops into the teens and another company does a buyout.

Ebay has taken the approach of our beloved Post Office; make a public announcement about the *small* changes (First Class going up 1-cent) and say nothing about the major ones (Priority going up several $$$).


I've been on ebay since 1999, transacted more than 6500 sales and have received only two 'negative feedbacks' (can't please everyone!). My goods are mainly antiques and collectibles in the $25-$400 range. I typically carry about 100-200 items in my ebay Store and put a dozen or so 'treasures' to auction, each week.

The much-heralded 50% fee reduction on the insert fee amounts to a 3-to-5 cents savings for a Store item (currently, it is 6-to-0 cents). Ebay raised the backend fees (Final Value Fee - FVF) on Store items in a tiered fashion. For a $25 item, the FVF increased from 10% to 12%.

That translates into an extra 50-cents, minus the 5-cents savings of the 'reduced' insert fee, leaves a 45-cent increase. That works out to an 18% increase in total fees. The high-dollar items extend into (new) higher tiers, which increases ebay's take rate. For a $125 item, total current fees (insert & FVF) are $9.10 - the new fees will total $10.05 - the total fee increase is $0.95, a 10.4% increase.

For auction items, a different tiered fee structure is in place. These tiers can be accessed here: http://pages.ebay.com/sell/update08/basic/index.html#insertion. The insert fees for auctions, on the bottom 3 tiers (up to $25 starting bid), was decreased by 5-cents.

Example: An item is started with a $12 opening bid, the insert fee is 55-cents, down from 60-cents. A nickel is saved. Say the item sells for $75, the FVF will be $3.94, as opposed to the current FVF of $2.94. After subtracting the 'saved nickel', that leaves an increase of 95-cents in fees, a 32.3% increase.


The only sellers that actually will see a total fee decrease are the ones that list items that don't sell very well. If they start to sell their inventory in the 35% sell-through range, they too will see the increase. In other words, this "Fee Decrease" rewards the stale item sellers and penalizes the successful seller.

It was only a year ago that ebay was talking about the New Plan of getting rid of (their words) The Clutter on the site. Now, they appear to not only want that clutter, but even more perplexing, they want to push away the fast moving and expensive items.

The stated purpose of all of this re-alignment is to rejuvenate the ebay marketplace, right? Bring the buyers back to ebay and even to get new ones, correct? Then I have a simple question. When the sellers fees are increased, who do you think will actually pay for them?

I've been an eBay user since 2002. I had a store for four years as well, closing it in 2006.

The latest changes are just part of the ever-shifting changes on eBay that are geared only to the stockholders, with no concern as to the impact on the sellers.

The fee changes are a part of life, and while my own income never seems to go up (in part due to selling fees!), the cost of selling does. I can deal with that better than the other changes.

eBay continually strips the rights of the sellers, while continuing to tout that the buyers are their customers, and they are working for their customers. Wrong! The SELLERS are the eBay customers - the ones paying the fees, the sales commissions and any thing else eBay chooses to charge us. The buyers are the sellers' customers, and the sellers are eBay's customers. They just can't seem to grasp it.

Fact is, the buyers will go where there are things to buy.

If the smaller sellers who are tired of all these games would actively use the MANY other viable venues that now exist, eBay would indeed experience the decrease. In the 2006 boycott, there were not many good places for sellers to go. However, in 2008, it is a different e-ballgame, and the sellers who have not stuck their heads out from the collective eBay sand need to look around!

There are MANY other places that offer just as many services (and sometimes more) for less cost. Etsy offers a showplace for handmade goods that is growing in leaps and bounds. The site works fine, and is a viable option.

Another overlooked and often-maligned place is Wagglepop (WP). When its first ambitious attempt to compete head-on with the hippo in the garden eBay didn't work, many sellers wrote them off permanently. That was a bad idea! WP learned from its mistakes, revamped, re-wrote and re-opened quite a while back. Their new site is a definite alternative to eBay for small sellers. They changed to a stores-only format in November 2007, requiring a commitment from their sellers more than the occasional penny auction listing.

The site is colorful, functions well and offers it all for a fraction of the cost of eBay. They have experienced great growth this year, and it looks like it will be continuing, with the mass exodus of eBay sellers who have just simply had enough.
Had enough of the ever-changing fees, the rules & regs benefitting only buyers, and little if any customer service. By contrast, WP offers great customer service, a flat-rate store pricing for unlimited listings, and very good search engine placement. There are many opportunities for disgruntled eBay sellers to open a store there for a fraction of the cost, no overglut of Chinese listings or buried under the massive drop-shippers who list the entire catalog.

I both buy and sell on eBay, Etsy and WP, and have used other places as well. Bidville remains good for some things, and also offers affordable stores. My reservation with them remains with their new parent company, U-Bid, who has not seemed to pump any dollars into site improvement since its acquisition of Bidville.

Of course, there are a multitude of other places available for small e-commerce store owners today. However, the author's mention of Overstock needs to be considered carefully, since it still isn't a great place for the small seller to do business. It is geared more towards the wholesale industry or large companies, not the individual.

The feedback restrictions are just the cherry on the top of the whole pile of reasons to look outside eBay for your selling hosts. To limit sellers from leaving a negative is riduculous. Yes, there are sellers who slam retaliation FB's - but there are many buyers who hold FB hostage for a refund as well. Both parties are guilty, but only one is getting punished.

eBay's further choice of opting to hold funds for up to three weeks (while still expecting the seller to ship the merchandise at their own expense) further shows that eBay considers itself to be the unchallenged king of the e-commerce world. It is time for a revolt way beyond a one-week listing boycott. It is time to look elsewhere, and realize that eBay no longer serves to create a bridge between byer and seller, but only as a way to line stockholder pockets. (I personally consider it a goal to help to NOT contribute to Meg Whitman's outrageous $600K annual B/O/D consulting fee!)

Small sellers, homemakers, or anyone looking to supplement their current income by selling online needs to spend some time looking around - there are MANY other viable places in 2008 to sell. You don't need to live under the tyranny which calls itself eBay.

Meg has left a horrible mess for Ebay! How can she get away with merely walking away from all the Ebay Fraud she created over the years?! If she has any political aspirations, she can sure forget it! lmao!

The only positive thing in all the eBay changes is the change to remove negative feedbacks from NARU'd (no longer registered) users. Of course, sellers have been asking for this for YEARS and YEARS now, so perhaps this is a breadcrumb tossed our way in exchange for losing the benefit of leaving a possible negative (or even neutral!) feedback.

It is way too little, way too late for me to be impressed. It should have been done in 2003!
Sellers have always been at the mercy of buyers unfamiliar with how shopping online actually works, and think items will be in the mailbox the next day.

Let's not forget that eBay allows the scam artists to continue to sell no matter what their feedback score is, or how many negatives they have received. If they have power seller status, eBay looks the other way.

The problems eBay currently experiences with poor buying experience is the culmination of their own lack of action on policing the site and taking action on reports of fraud.

However, instead of actually doing their job even yet, they are going to further punish the sellers with even more restrictions and limitations (but we get to pay more for the privilege!).

I for one, would really like to know how they can legally hold funds in Paypal for up to three weeks. For starters, it should be a conflict of interest for eBay to have purchased Paypal at all. But, they found a loophole and did it. Now, they are exploiting sellers, and leaving them open to all kinds of further financial disasters. Why should they care though - they have their golden salary packages. They never see the "little people", so why should the king care.

(As Yzma said in Disney's "The Emperor's New Groove", when a peasant same asking for some help to get food - "you really should have thought about that before you became a peasant". eBay truly is no longer interested in the selling experience, only in their stockholder reports and personal bank accounts.)

I have to agree with Dlila above. That's exactly the point along with many other issues that have gone completely unattended. I've being selling on eBay for 8 years, not one negative feedback, happy customers many becoming internet friends. I have encountered the fraud buyer in many, many occasions, and if it wasn't by the feedback system we used to have ebay wouldn't have taken them all down, why change it now?! why an honest seller who depends on a very subjective feedback system has to suffer for this? the fees I don't mind, but the feedback system I do along with the hundreds of new changes and frauds by the hundreds happening every day.

Why instead of changing something that has worked wonders since eBay started they don't clean the market and enforce their own policies? at the beginning of this year a huge scandal opened up after many of us, unaware of the situation for 8 months but suffering a huge lack in sales, realized a Featured Plus fraud has being taking place on eBay since April 2007. Someone decided to make a change that affected the way newly listed items would appear on the queue. This change would make any revised listing appear at the top of the queue regardless of time left and bear for the entire duration of the listing, the newly listed icon in front of the title. Nonetheless in the art category which was the most affected by this since the number of FP (featured plus) listings is so ridiculous, it created a disaster not ever seen before. Dishonest and unscrupulous sellers started revising listings as much as every 10 minutes, with the help of a Vendio service, for the entire duration of the auction (7-10 days) to stay on top of the queue the whole time while leaving others no minimum chance of exposure even paying the same amount in listing fees. Many sellers knowing what they were doing was not legal, opened second ID's for the sole purpose of doing this, just in case they got suspended their original ID would not suffer the concequences. The sellers, quite a few, who engaged in this practice since the beginning of last years, have being repeatedly breaking 3 eBay policies for months, fee circumventing, search engine manipulation, and the creation of a second ID to avoid suspension, not mentioning they severely damaged the businesses of hundreds of sellers as they monopolized the results, and yet eBay has not suspended any of them despite the obvious and blatant infractions, and on top one of the sellers from Canada even got awarded an entrepreneurial award for high volume of sales in 2007, which for sure she wouldn't have gotten if she wasn't cheating the system, and there they are, committing fraud, engaging in illegal activities and eBay hasn't moved one finger to suspend any of those sellers, is like they are protecting them who knows why.

EBay became a joke, an alley filled with so much crime that is even ridiculous. The only thing that eBay needs is to go back to the successful marketplace it was before 2004. For all those programmers and heads of department to stop the continuous and permanent changes that are destroying the marketplace and for those who have being managing the site since the disaster of 2004 to please find another company to destroy that wouldn't have so many people depending on it.

EBay's stocks are so low because of the President, and CEO's fault who so badly have managed the company for so long. Obviously this people have no clue what an auction site needs and what the sellers need.

Me, along with thousands of sellers who filled the bank accounts of all those who so badly have managed the company leaves this game. I'm done.

E-Bay's problem is MANAGEMENT! First I'd like to say I was an EBAY stockholder, but sold because I saw these problems coming. I've bought and sold items on ebay for years. I don't do it everyday and can easily live without it. I probably make about 10-15 transactions per year. I can generally live with the fee increase, although I'm not sure EBAY is deserving of a feee increase considering the shit service they give. PAYPAL is the closet thing to a legal LOAN SHARK going. The rates are way to high and now they want to HOLD your money for 3 weeks. They claim to worry about potential FRAUD. They have no concern about fruad. I get bombarded with spoofs from fraudsters using ebay as areturn address. I have send each one to Spoof@ Ebay only to get the form email back conforming what I already knew, that these emails did not originate and weren't from EBAY. DUHHHH! I'd like to see EBAY'S record for prosecuting fraud. They don't care about fraud, but they want to use FRAUD as an excuse to get the float (interest) on all those dollars they want to hold for the extra weeks. I've cut back on my ebay use, just because they treat thier customers like crap. The only reason they are still in business is because no one has taken them on ...YET. I can't wait for a company that wants to make a buck, but treats it's customers fairly too!

I have two i.d.'s on eBay, a 'core' or auction-side identity and a Storefront id. I've been on eBay as a full time seller since 1997.

When the announcement about the fee increases was released I ran my numbers and foresaw an increase of 16% in my Store fees.

I decided to open a dotcom site instead, and will be closing my eBay storefront.

Whether I agree or disagree with recent changes are irrelevant. I simply chose to do business elsewhere. I have the same merchandise now at a lower cost to my buyers who will still receive my 100%, near-5-star service. eBay will get along without me just fine.

www.oregontrailcrossing.com

As a powerseller with 100% feedback I was restricted for 30 days because a non-paying bidder didnt pay and ebay sent a unpaid strike to them. In return I lost $5000 in sales during November because I wasnt allowed to list because earlier that week I had oustanding sells that put me over the 75% limit and the next 3 weeks I was dead in the water.

Now on top of this last year they raised all rates across the board and now this year they want more money plus more power to a buyer on feedback. Plus Powerseller or not Paypal is being forced on us in all ways from no payment for 21 days on top of listing exposure Etc.

The list goes on and on so I decided in January already to quit selling there period and use other markets where I am not insulted by some Corporate Company that just does not give a ?. Farewell ebay and hope you crash and burn as I will never buy or sell there again. Plus I did sell my stocks earlier and actually invested in Amazon.com at the same time. HA HA as I am laughing to the Bank. GOOD DAY