It looks like my friends at eBay (finally) woke up: eBay US just announced a dramatic change in fees for their fixed price (Buy-It-Now) items. After eBay struggled with their growth and saw quite a few sellers either abandon ship or grow their out-of-eBay business rather significantly, eBay seems to have heard the message and “bit the bullet”: They lowered the listing fee for fixed price items from $.15 - $4 (!) depending on the starting price and for a maximum duration of a meager 7 days to a flat $.35 for a whopping 30 days maximum duration. This comes with an increase in final value fees - though the total net effect is definitely a significant reduction in total fees for a seller.

This move will reduce the risk for any seller in listing his items on eBay (in case they don’t sell after 30 days the loss is only $.35) - which will result in a dramatic increase in total listings on the eBay marketplace. This is an interesting move as eBay always was concerned about a) the average conversion rate (ratio between listed and sold items) and b) findability (the ability of consumers to actually find what they are looking for - which gets much harder the more items are available for sale). It looks like eBay gave up it’s reservation on point a) - or believes that with a 30 day time period most items will actually sell, thus the change will not influence the overall average conversion rate too much. With point b) I guess (and hope) eBay has some improvements to their search engine in the making - otherwise it can get messy (I remember the old days when you searched for a cell phone and you found pages and pages full of cell phone accessories). It will also be interesting to see when we see these changes globally (especially in the UK and Germany - eBay’s strong international footholds).

eBay is also quite aggressive in promoting these changes (the gloves are definitely off) and launched a mini-site with examples and even videos highlighting the importance of the change (watch the video “Priced to Sell: Big Changes at the World’s Largest Marketplace” for a great Lorrie Norrington pushing the changes really hard):

http://thebestplacetosell.ebay.com/

Good to have you back eBay!

Disclaimer: I worked at eBay from 2001 to 2005.