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%!).

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

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.

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

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.

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

Back in 2010 when we were getting the website setup and went into beta testing I ran into a gentleman with a Jeep at a local gas station. I mentioned Bid4Jeeps to him and suggested he try it. So, I saw that he registered, but never listed anything. Last week I ran into him again, so I gently worked the conversation toward the auction site and asked why he hadn’t listed some items.

He told me he didn’t have any Jeep parts for sale. I reminded him it wasn’t strictly for Jeeps and Jeep parts. While I would like to see much more in the way of Jeepers becoming active with their jeep items, anyone can list anything. He told me he had a bunch of old magazines that he wanted to sell, but it wasn’t worth his time on eBay after paying a 15% final value fee and listing fees. “List ‘em all,” I told him.

And is he ever!

When I noticed his total listings were approaching 100 I gave him a call. These were old magazines and very much a collectors dream. He had Sports Illustrated magazines from 1955 – the first year they were published and he was selling them below what was being asked on eBay.

He told me that he was happy to start listing them again and even if they didn’t sell, at least he wouldn’t be making eBay rich using their website (I knew I liked him!). So, we talked some more and being a bit of a sports enthusiast I was curious about the early Sports Illustrated magazines he had among the Time and Newsweek magazines.

Seems he has hundreds of them, including the first and second Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues from 1964 and 1965, among his collection.

He tells me that though it is a tedious process listing so many magazines he is going to keep at it. “Is 500 too many?”, he asked. He thinks that is about the total number of magazines he has collected.

Bless you, PlayItAgain. If only we could find a Jeep enthusiast willing to list that many items!

If you want to check out PlayItAgain’s magazine store where you’ll find collectible magazines from Sports Illustrated, Time, and Newsweek, CLICK HERE. He is offering some real bargains!

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

A bulklister is most often used by those who are in the business of selling Jeeps and Jeep parts, or have a vast majority of items that they continuously sell. Bulklisters are used in conjunction with a .csv file in which items are listed and delineated with a separator character such as a hash bar, comma, or other character.

This delineated file can show a variety of information the seller wants to display, such as the title of the item, stock number, a url address of picture to be displayed, a description, price of the item, and other information.

If you’re lost at this point, the bulklister probably isn’t something you’ll need, but to continue, a delineated .csv file might appear as below, shown as a small part of a text file:

With our bulklister, we offer the ability for members to create their own .csv files for use on Bid4Jeeps. It can also import .csv files that you prepare on your desktop.

It should be pointed out that the preparation of a .csv file can be a tenuous task, which is why most sellers don’t create one. It is much simpler to just list a few items at a time after setting the prefilled fields/global settings on your account. Only advanced computer users familiar with a bulklister should try to tackle using the bulklister. You should also be aware that the bulklister we provide was developed by a third party we outsourced to create it for our use. It functions, but we hoped for something better.

However, for our members who use eBay and turbolister, we have plans to install a new feature before summer arrives, depending upon the amount of members we have. It will be costly and we have to weigh the expense against the amount of use it will actually have.

This new program we hope to have installed will allow anyone using eBay and their turbolister to import all their eBay listings to Bid4Jeeps with as few as 3 simple clicks. Your ebay listing will be copied to Bid4Jeeps, transferring all information and having your Bid4Jeeps listings appear exactly as they do on eBay.

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

What we’re surprised at is that there aren’t just more of the everyday people listing their items on Bid4Jeeps. For years we listened to and talked with people on blogs and forums who constantly complained of high eBay fees and how it wasn’t worth listing their items because of the expense and how much was taken in the end from their sale.

Perhaps they’ll start listing things in the coming months. We don’t know. Many of these members we contacted directly when our site was in beta and they registered. Some of them listed a few jeep parts and personal items, but many we never heard from again. We just expected more from those who yelled the loudest.

Anyway, back to our vendors…

We’re happy to have them on board. Most have chosen to send vistors to their own website, but that is their privilege they paid for. Since we make no money on fees and people can list personal items for free anyway we’re happy for the revenue that keeps our site paid for.

Just note, if you are a vendor, or have your own website, you must contact us to arrange payment for inserting redirection links on your listings.

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

Our first responder to create an account was The JeepHut. Therefore, we would like to take this opportunity to welcome The JeepHut and thank them for participating on our site.

We believe that with the addition of this fine vendor and more who may follow, it will help Bid4Jeeps become more successful and that success will be reciprocated for those who list their Jeeps, Jeep parts, and personal items with us.

The JeepHut offers New, Overstock, Surplus, Used and Scratch/Dent Jeep parts, Including bumpers, lifts, accessories, winches, fender flares, soft tops, and anything else related to Jeep vehicles.

With a 99% positive rating from eBay, we’re sure they will be an asset to our members who wish to buy some good, new and used Jeep parts on Bid4Jeeps.

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

Your online payment choices, shipping details, and other areas are provided so that you don’t have to constantly retype this information for each listing. Once filled out, your information will appear as you create a new item listing.

Of course, anything you provide as prefilled information can be changed during the listing process of each item if you need to make changes that are specific to that item.

Two areas that you should take a special interest in is the direct payment methods you can offer. If you have a Paypal account, as most people do, you should have this enabled before you begin making your new listings.

The other area is the relisting of your item. Relisting your item if it doesn’t sell costs nothing and unlike eBay, we do not charge you if your item does not sell after relisting it. You should also set the auto-relisting to 3 times – the maximum allowed of free relistings we offer.

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

What we decided to do was to offer gift certificates, or gift cards from a variety of businesses in the auto industry. While some of our members may not be Jeep owners, as it isn’t a requirement to own a Jeep in order to join our site, everyone has a vehicle of some kind.

We also didn’t want to just award a reward to someone who listed the most items. Our concern was that listings would consist of items that weren’t legitimate or realistic. It would be too easy for someone to list a pencil for $50, just to obtain a credit toward winning the contest. Instead, we went for the “fishbowl” approach. Members would earn points for listings and other actions they performed, but additional points would be awarded for purchases and inviting friends, for example. We also closely monitor the listings.

Our members can gain an increase in their odds of winning, but every member has a chance of winning. The same way a person who buys one ticket for a raffle has a chance of winning, if all the tickets are drawn out of a hat. Our computer program picks the winner and it is done without the influence of a human element.

Our first contest ran in January and has concluded.

Congratulations to Bid4Jeeps member, Maggiesheart. Maggiesheart won with a 7.8% chance of winning. She listed 9 items in the month of January and made 1 purchase using Buy It Now. Maggiesheart joined Bid4Jeeps in late December and resides in Colorado. She will receive her $100 JC Whitney gift certificate via the USPS.

Our new contest for February ends on February 28th. If you are not a member of Bid4Jeeps, be sure to join. More contests will follow throughout the year.

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.

These are important settings that give you a number of options for you to enable or disable. Among these options are those that inform you of your affiliate efforts producing results, but more important are those options to be notified of the following incidents:

As you can see, the above options relate directly to your listings and your customers.

Visit the “Mail Preferences” link in your Control Panel to select those options you wish to be informed of when they occur.

Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? Bid4Jeeps - The free eBay for Jeep lovers.