| jeffweico | 09-15-2015 12:57 AM |
Re: Seller update 2016. Time of relief
The rules they are proposing actually make a lot more sense. Remember Donohoe is over at PayPal now. So, eBay very well could want to make a change to stop losing sellers left and right for silly reasons. How does it help eBay to lose sellers because of postal delays beyond their control? A couple of my accounts got SLAUGHTERED last Christmas because of problems at the sorting center. So, even though I shipped within 24 hours and usually far less, I was beaten up for the problems experienced by the USPS.
PayPal was the part of eBay that was driving all of the profit growth. eBay revenues and profits have been FLAT for a long time now. So, to keep their stock price high and their investors happy, they are going to have to increase revenues and profits. And that is difficult to do while you are kicking sellers off left and right. What is their alternative? A $5 "insertion fee"? I tolerated insertion fees for awhile since most of the items I listed sold. But these days, if you have 100 items listed, you probably are NOT going to sell all of them, just a small percentage of them. So the market will not bear a lot of new fees. As expensive as it is to sell on eBay, remember, the fees used to be EVEN HIGHER! They have DECREASED their fees over the last few years as they realized it no longer made sense for people to keep listing items that were not quick sellers. And there are not enough quick selling items for them to make it up that way.
So, now it would seem that it is in eBay's own best interest to try to keep their sellers. And that is what makes me believe this is real. It does NOT mean that eBay will go back to the "anything goes" days of the late 1990's, but it no longer makes sense for them to have crackdown after crackdown on good sellers. | 
