Hi My first post here. I am so glad I found this site.

I have been on eBay since 1999 and I am both a buyer and a seller so I can see the good and bad from both points of view.

I have heard a lot of talk about the new 35¢ 30 day fixed price listing being the "Beginning of the End for Auctions". I really don't think that is the case. I believe auctions are vital to eBay for attracting the buyer and giving them the incentive needed to sign up and place a bid in hopes of getting an awesome deal.

As a buyer I love the 99¢ NR auctions. Especially when the descriptions and pics are not so good. Sometimes I win things at such low prices that I almost feel like a thief but then I think that without my bid the seller would have gotten even less for the item!

As a seller the 99¢ NR auctions no longer work for me. They used to be fun but now there is just too much competition and the items I sell have been over saturated with HK sellers. The good thing about the HK sellers is that they usually don't last long and many of my customers will come back to me once they have had a bad experience with a bad HK seller. It just makes me sad that I couldn't warn them and they had to learn the hard way that the lowest price is not the only thing that matters.

IMO this new 35¢ 30 day listing is just a way for eBay raise store listings fees by nearly 1200% without all the noise, instant store closures & rapid reduction in listings counts (not sure, does the counter count store listings?)

By letting sellers think they are getting a deal on fixed price listings there will be a flood of fixed priced listings for the upcoming holiday season. Then once enough sellers are celebrating and listing anything and everything for 30 days at 35¢ there will be so many fixed price listings that the store listing format will become obsolete and they will announce "No More Store Listing Format".

My guess is around the end of the year stores or at least store listing format will be done away with. They might keep the stores for you to organize your fixed price listings so that they can still get that extra $15 a month.

I may be wrong about this but around this time least year when they started the "paypal only" in AU I told a lot of people that it would be here in a year! Yes I know, it's not "PayPal Only" They also allow merchant accounts but they know that many sellers are not businesses that have or can get merchant accounts so for good portion of us it will be paypal only. Most of us already accept paypal so it's just a matter or removing the check/mo options.

I have also heard but have not been able to confirm that they have already announced stores closing in the UK. Does anyone know if this is true?

If you read the recent announcements carefully there are a lot of places where it says "Until the ends of the year" or "Through the end of the year" so the Q that kept popping into my mind was WTF is going to happen at the "End Of The Year"

Please be nice, this is opinion only and I may be crazy! If you think I am wrong no big deal. But if you have a store and you depend on that store to pay bills and feed your family please please please do what you can to have yourself covered just in case. If I am wrong and you prepare by creating other sources of income you still gain by having more income but if I am right and you do not prepare it will hurt.

It is going to hurt me pretty bad but I am preparing now. I have been procrastinating about it since 2004 and since the constant changes with policies and postage rates over the past 2 years I haven't had time to do anything but edit, edit, edit.... now I have to edit out my references to MOs, remove my email addy etc...

Ebay stores are dead. Why pay the mini of 15.00 a month for saving a few cents on the listings and get buried on the bottom of the search page.
35 cents a pop for 30 days and no price ceiling and get frontline positioning. Throw in the free shipping incentive. No brainer!

The advantage of having an eBay store for me was the 75% store referral credit.

I do not know if many sellers knew about the store referral credit but whenever you sent someone to your store from an off eBay link or from a direct return to your store (instead of going to eBay first) eBay would give the seller back 75% of the final value fees on the store items purchased by that buyer! That brings the current 12% FVF down to just 3% FVF on the referral purchases.

I saved $50 to $100 each month with store referral credits and if store listings go away so will the credits.

I cannot begin to count the # of people I directed to my eBay store over the years stating that I preferred to sell through eBay because it helped me track inventory and manage my invoices and that the time saved was worth the fees paid and so on...

I know about the savings. Sounds like keeping an Ebay store will work for you. It won't work for me. difference of opinion and business model. Good luck

No, I don't think it will work for my business model any longer either. The main reason being the no more email contact.

I feel that being able to contact each other is a vital part of the transaction. eBay's message system is just as glitchy as everything else on eBay and there have been MANY times where I have had to email someone directly because I could not get a message through the system.

I do not feel safe doing business with someone that I cannot contact. IMO this policy will only make it a safer place for the scammers to buy and sell anonymously.

I am going through my favorite sellers list now and bookmarking their websites and adding their email addys to my address book.

eBay seems to have forgotten that they are nothing more than a buggy piece of software that buyers and sellers use to do business with each other. There is lots of other software out there now with a lot less bugs so I am OFF to the races

Lesson Learned. Only have myself to blame. Will never put all my eggs in one basket again.

No more private e-mail goes into effect the first of 2009. Grab what you can for now. Notify your buyers.

I closed my store. I will list in auction and with the 35 cent FP to try and draw customers to my website where they will find all the thousands of items I once had in my ebay store.

Actually it has already started for the some of the invoices. I always copy myself on the invoices and some have come through with no email address and my name at the top instead of the buyers name. The buyers do not seem to be getting their email copies of these new invoices so it's just more of the same old story...piling new glitches on top of old glitches.

what's funny is all of sudden is that my Ebay store has picked up on sales. Of course, that reflects that any seller with the intelligence of a Sea Sponge will hold off until the 16th.

Hi lindajean Me too. I will no longer be sending MY customers to eBay. If eBay can't trust me then I can't trust them.

What's funny is I've already started adding products elsewhere and I realized something amazing...once the item is up that's it! It's done. I don't have to keep editing and re-listing it constantly to adjust with ever changing rules and increasing fees. I had not even finished editing all my listings to adjust for the changes 6 months ago. Now I have to start all over and remove my email address and references to checks & MOs? Stick a fork in me, I'm done!

It's virtually no fun anymore. I cannot keep up with all the changes. So Pathetic.

OMG eBay just called me. Freaky, thought I was going to get slapped for my opinions but it was just "to explain the new policies"

I got the same phone call yesterday. The Ebay person said, Hi my name is such and such. Have you heard the Exciting Changes at ebay? I said no. When the Ebay person explained to me the "great" changes. I said, Oh those changes. After that the conversation went downhill. I'm pretty sure that by the end of the phone call, either the Ebay person went "Screaming into the Night" or went straight to Rehab.

OutWest4Less wrote (View Post): › what's funny is all of sudden is that my Ebay store has picked up on sales.

My sales are up too. I just told my BF last night that it was funny how as soon as I gave up on eBay and started listing elsewhere I started getting (almost back to normal) eBay sales.

Used to, when we'd get these types of calls from eBay we found out through the grapevine that these weren't really eBay employees calling. It was a third party contracted by eBay to read the script. That's why if you probed you could tell pretty quickly that they didn't have much knowledge about the subject, and usually wouldn't discuss it. Naturally whatever complaints or observations you gave them stopped right there, with them.

Are we sure this round of calls is really from eBay inc people and not a third party on eBay's behalf?