Coping with eBay’s Shop Inventory Price Changes

Keeping up with eBay changes is becoming a full time job and you could be forgive for thinking that eBay has lost its way. It was only a few months ago that they decided to include their store listings in their core search. However, recently this has all been reversed and the store final value fees have been increased

Why has this happened

Presumably because eBay was loosing money. Before the changes store listings made up 83% of listings but only 9% of sales by volume. The inclusion of store listings in the core search meant that there was a switch to store listings and their cheaper listing fees. The new change is supposed to reverse this trend and put the focus back on the core listings.

How is this affecting sellers

All Sellers

The store increases are going to encourage all eBay sellers to investigate other channels to sell through such as their own ecommerce site.

Primarily Shop sellers

Sellers who depend on selling through their stores are going to have to either rethink their business or move to other platforms. Bulk sellers of low value items such as CDs and DVDs are going to be particularly hard hit.

Hybrid Core/Shop sellers

These sellers will keep or increase their core listings and scale back their store listings.

Primarily core sellers

The recent price change and search changes will benefit sellers in the core (or whose items are suitable for the core listings) as their listings will be given increased visability over store listings, and less supply (i.e. no store listings) could lead to more demand and higher ASPs.

Opinion

I was always under the impression that store inventory was a cheap place to place the inventory so that it coudl be upsold to core listing customers. In making store listings uneconomic, this going to force a lot of these rather mundane identkit items into the core listings which seems to be going against what eBay is trying to achieve with eBay express i.e. keeping high quality in the core listings. Instead of playing with the listing formats, perhaps eBay should be concentrating on improving their search facility to enable users to find the items they want.