eBay strike will be non-event

The strike by eBay sellers that is supposed to start at midnight already looks doomed to failure. Listings on the site are reportedly up 25% following a 20c cheap listing day in the US and a revision of listing fees for US media sellers to reflect those already in place for UK sellers.

To be perfectly honest I’ve never considered serious sellers as likely to strike in the first place, larger sellers have employees and business premises that need paying for and medium sized sellers rely on eBay for their income. The only type of seller that can afford to strike are those that use the site for pin money and don’t rely on it for their income.

Auctionbytes commenting “Is eBay Boycott for real” appear not to be talking to business sellers with their summation “What I’m hearing from sellers is not, can we afford to boycott eBay for a week, but rather, can we afford to continue selling on eBay once these changes roll out?” Quite frankly listing fees are down, final value fees are up, you’ll only pay final value fees if your item sells so setting your prices at a realistic level and making a real profit is the way to go.

For far too long many eBay sellers haven’t considered the real costs of running a business - think about the overheads you’d entail if you ran a high street shop and in comparison eBay fees pale into insignificance. If a seller can’t make a profit on eBay then quite simply you have to question if they could make a profit anywhere?

My predictions for the week ahead are that serious business sellers will carry on listing in greater quantities then ever before, in particular we’ll see a huge increase in listings from media sellers in the US. A few hobby sellers who use eBay for pin money will strike, list elsewhere for a week, and be back listing on eBay by the end of the month.

Alternative auction sites will report huge spikes in listings and a bump in conversion rates, but will fail to quantify hard numbers but report fluffy percentages. (Remember when eBid reported a sales increase of 57% in the UK and 221% in the US they were comparing Christmas sales with the previous June’s!)

Sellers will find that listing on alternative sites simply doesn’t bring in the volume of sales that eBay does. Sellers will happily buy from each other for a week before realising sellers buying from sellers doesn’t make money - more buyers than sellers are needed for a successful marketplace and that’s what eBay has and the other sites don’t.

In two weeks time it’ll all be forgotten and with the fee changes and pending feedback changes and volume discounts kicking in, eBay will have become a better place for all sellers.