Do you sell on ebay? Once again, ebay sides with the big corporate sellers and sticks it to little guys .....?

See if you agree with my take on the most recent changes to fee discounts and search status systems on ebay.

I am up on my soap box for a short message that concerns me and probably you too if you are a small ebay seller. Did you know that in the new & "improved" ebay YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE PENALIZED for NOT shipping everything you sell in ONE DAY?

Once again, ebay sides with the big corporate sellers and sticks it to the little guys.

Now this would not be so bad but the ebay sales pitch for quite some time now has been how ebay is a small business incubator. They claim to be favourable to the little guy and that they are a perfect setting for a small business to test the waters and see if they have a viable business model.

How is it that they are doing this? Well when you count everything, the listing fee, the paypal fee, the final value fee and the shipping fee, ebay has some pretty high fees compared to other online selling venues but they do offer discounts off those fees if you play by their rules. And what are the rules? That would be the ones that favour big corporate sellers who have large staffs, dedicated shipping departments and have fine tuned their selling practices so that they never have to take garage sale prices for their items.

Probably the hardest of the new ebay rules to abide by is the one day shipping rule. If you do not promise to ship in one day from receiving cleared payment and then actually perform that one day shipping promise then you cannot get the discount off the final value fee, and you will be knocked down in your search status. What that means in English is you will pay full price on all the fees and when people search for other items you sell, the preferred sellers will get the top of the page listings and your listings will be on page 3 or 4 or maybe page 20 or 30 basically assuring that no one will ever see your items and you will get very few bids.

Now that might not be a problem if the small seller was able to totally focus on shipping every item that they sell ASAP but the small seller often is working another job or is a single parent who has 2 or 3 kids to take care of, or just a person who sells 80 different categories of items, some big some small and some that occasionally need to be crated before shipping. Being able to ship in one day under these circumstances is basically impossible. But for the big corporate seller, who has a dedicated shipping department? well that is no problem for them.

So what am I saying here? I guess the main message I am trying to get out to EBAY is that their claim of being favorable to small businesses, is bogus. They have obviously been bought off just like every other good thing in America, it seems, by the big corporations.

So do you agree with me? If so please contact ebay and complain. Maybe if enough people call them on their favouritism to corporate sellers they will get the message and change things back to a more fair system.