Bid4Jeeps Blog

As a card carrying member on eBay I still receive their newsletter to keep abreast of the competition. As everyone who uses eBay must have received, the latest eBay newsletter announces that eBay is introducing free “any price” listings beginning on April 19th, 2011. Members can list up to 50 items in any one month period for free.

On the surface it sounds like a decent change that is long overdue at eBay, but is it a benefit to sellers? Will sellers keep more of the money that their items sell for? On the surface it might appear so, but eBay has simply changed the manner in which they get your money and 50 auction style listings in a month isn’t that many, considering that their auction listings only remain active for 7 days before they expire. This means that you’ll be able to list about 12 items only 4 times each month, if they expire without being sold. Not such a hot deal when you’ve got a lot more items than that you want to list repeatedly.

This is the eBay newsletter announcing the change:

Starting April 19, you’ll be able to list your items Auction-style FREE, at any start price, up to 50 listings a month. Plus you can add the Buy It Now option to these listings FREE to grab buyers in a hurry. Set the price you want and sell it fast! This is not a limited-time special but a change in eBay Standard fees to help you list more for FREE all the time–even those high ticket items! Pay only if your item sells.

Also, because we know buyers take into consideration the total cost of an item, also starting April 19, to encourage sellers to keep shipping costs low, the Final Value Fee will be applied to the total amount of the sale–including shipping.

Disregarding the fact that 50 items isn’t that many if a person plans on emptying a garage or attic, which we discovered when we first offered 10 items for free in our stores. For our members stores, we increased free listings to 100 items and have always offered unlimited free items on the auction area. eBay, on the other hand still does not offer any free store listings and their 50 free listings only applies to auction style listings.

The main change to the new eBay policy is that they will now be collecting anywhere from 8% – 15% on the total of the sale – including shipping charges. Will this reduce a sellers shipping charges?

Hardly.

Sellers will simply increase their shipping charges the percentage of what they will have to pay in this hidden FVF of using the percentage of the shipping charge and, considering the cost of shipping items these days, eBay will almost assuredly generate more income from tagging the shipping charges as part of their FVF, than they would in using their flat fee, which topped out at $4 for listing an expensive item.

The majority of items on eBay are listed between $1.00 and $10.00. Normally eBay would only get 25 cents in fees for such listings. The smallest Priority Mail Flat Rate box costs $4.85. eBay will now generate about 50 cents in revenue on that cost. More, if a larger box is used, or weight and size requires additional postage.

Trust me when I tell you that eBay does nothing that loses them money. There is no doubt that they crunched the numbers, including cost of items being sold and shipping charges associated with the sales taking place on their website. They will undoubtedly make more money with this new structure of charging sellers a percentage of the total sale including shipping charges being figured into the FVF.

What will we change to keep eBay off-balance?

As of today, because eBay has offered no fee for using Buy It Now on 50 items, we’re removing our Buy It Now fee completely on all listings. No limit.

The Buy It Now option can be included at no charge on Bid4Jeeps and, as we already changed last week before eBay came out with their offer regarding auction style listings, we offer you your own store for up to 100 items you can list for free. Also, don’t forget that we offer UNLIMITED auction style listings for FREE – with free relistings – and our FVF is as low as 1.9% (compare that to eBay’s 15%!).

Our member, PlayItAgain, who opened the store, The  Magazine Stand, approached us with an idea that we thought was simply great.

In fact, it’s working so well for him that we figured everybody should have the benefit of the brain storm.

It involves implementing the use of an email auto-responder.

For those who are unaware of what an auto-responder is, we’ll explain it in simple terms…

An auto-responder is a program used for emails sent to a specific email address. The owner of the email address writes a response to any email it receives and saves it. The auto-responder automatically sends this saved response back to the sender of the email.

Our member, PlayItAgain, thought it would be a great idea to list a few items on eBay and in the listing provide an email address that a potential buyer could write to in order to receive a discount on the item if they came to Yabexe.com (aka Bid4Jeeps), or find other items not listed on eBay. These other items would, of course, be found on our website because of the savings in listing fees, store fees, and Final Value Fees.

PlayItAgain provided us the text he wanted in his email. We set up the auto-responder and provided him with a unique email address for him to use in his eBay listings. He simply told his eBay visitors to email him for potential savings and our auto-responder did the rest. He never sees the emails sent him. Our auto-responder does all the work, sending out an email with his store logo and a direct link to his store.

If you want to see his email that we set up for him, send an email to: themagazinestand@yabexe.com.

Would you like your own auto-responder email address to use elsewhere, that will inform people about your store on our website?

If so, join us, set up your store, and then contact us. We’ll set you up and you won’t even have to deal with the spam that some email addresses generate.

We want more people to create stores. Initially, we assumed that more people would want to forgo setting up a store in favor of quick listings on the auction end of Bid4Jeeps, so we offered 10 free store listings (of course, unlimited “auction” listings were still offered). After that, a nominal subscription fee was imposed.

Well, it seems that people would like to set up a store with more than 10 items they can manage. Considering eBay is now trying to counter our auction site, that offers members free listings by offering their members up to 100 free auction listings (if they start at below a buck), we’re raising the bar.

While eBay offers their 100 free listings with restrictions (the less than $1.00 starting price) and still doesn’t offer a free store, we’re going to put the pressure on them.

Rather than 10 free store items, you can now list 100 items in your own store without having to pay a store fee of any kind. You can also still list an unlimited number of items outside your store. No restrictions on starting price and no listing fees. After the initial 100, the next level store (up to 500 items) is only $4.95/mo.

This is now set in stone. We won’t revert back to previous levels later. 100 store items, unlimited main site items, and all for FREE!

And don’t forget… we offer free re-listings of your items if they don’t sell and unlike eBay, when we say free re-listings, we mean free. You won’t ever be charged any fees whether your item doesn’t sell the second, or third time. This means if you choose to list an item for up to 1 month in length, your free re-listings option will give you up to 3 months of your item being seen without ever costing you a dime.

Does listing an item for 1 month seem a long time to wait if you get a bid? It isn’t. If you’ve been paying attention you would have noted that any month long auction item that receives a bid will automatically become a 7 day auction. You also have the additional option of offering “Buy It Now” to your listings for only 25 cents (compare that to eBay’s BIN fee!).

So, create your store and choose your subscription option. Take advantage of our auction website that gives you a better alternative to eBay! We want all our members to start making money without making a huge corporation like eBay richer in this bad economy.