posted on January 16, 2001 10:46:00 AM new
Trying to figure out what to do about my Yahoo auctions. Now ebay is raising fees including a .30 for insertion and they're going to charge more to use a ten day auction.
posted on January 16, 2001 10:48:18 AM new
Time to move to some of the free sites. I've read about AuxPal, ePier, Pootah, LowestBids, BidBay, and others.
posted on January 16, 2001 11:20:18 AM new
Probably a direct result of the fees at Yahoo. Ebay listings increase, listing fees increase. $.5 isn't bad but I don't like the $.10 fee for 10 day auctions.
I was using more features in my listings so Ebay was making more $ per listing on our auctions. Now I will have to cut back a bit.
It seems that these sites want to nickel and dime us into the poor house.
On the bright side, I've been expecting this for a while and the fees were raised less than I expected. FVFs stay the same and It's still a better value than Yahoo....
[ edited by outoftheblue on Jan 16, 2001 11:23 AM ]
posted on January 16, 2001 11:23:36 AM new
I would love to use Lycos, if they would respond to seller's requests and their problems without a canned response, if they had more of a variety of categories to list in and if their site was more user friendly. As others have stated, it is a fantasic idea that needs to be developed and improved upon. If they cant do that, I cannot see listing too much with them in the future
posted on January 16, 2001 11:26:09 AM new
Now isn't this just SPECIAL, I still think something is going on here.
Or did Ebay think they got so much business from Yahoo leavers that they can just go for more...
And gads now charging if you want to go a 10 day auction...
Sad
Joan
posted on January 16, 2001 11:28:24 AM new
I am with you, Joan. Just think of all the new sellers they could have had. Now, they just alienated a few more. Too bad
posted on January 16, 2001 11:34:12 AM new
Perhaps Yahoo knew ahead of time that Ebay was going to increase their fees. Well yahoo is now a dime cheaper to list with! Something to think about!
posted on January 16, 2001 03:43:44 PM new
Ebay shows Yahoo how to increase revenue without causing a mass exodus of sellers to leave their site. "It's only a nickel or two". Times 100,000,000 listings. I have no idea what the total listings were on Yahoo before the fees, but I know the sports cards listing were at 500,000+ at any given time. Still can't understand why Yahoo opted to alienate so many sellers and decimate their listings with the .20 to $1.50 rates. They could have generated revenue from those listings with a "nickel or two" fee.
posted on January 16, 2001 04:44:13 PM new
I would Still rather put up a nickle more to sell on ebay then pay .80 a month to watch my item sit on yahoo .
83 items listed on yahoo this month so far one bid for under $4.00 if I was paying for this bunch of listing I would need a loan to foot the listing fees.
moveing some of my yahoo Items to epier.com and see what happens from there, if I get no bids on epier it will be as if I never moved them from yahoo. http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
posted on January 16, 2001 04:45:48 PM new
well, it looks like Yahoo is still the best place to sell low priced stuff. Are you seriously going to pay 30¢ + FVF + any paypal or billpoint fees to Ebay to sell a sports card or a post card or a toy or whatever for a dollar or 2? It has reached the "not worth it" point. If all the sellers of low-dollar items would stick with Yahoo, it would still be worth it since there would be enough variety to attract the buyers. As it is, sports card/postcard/small toy sellers are gonna end up back at the local flea markets, because selling online just isn't too practical anymore. Or like me, looking for a "real" job.
posted on January 17, 2001 02:44:13 AM new
[CAgrrl}
Your sellthru rate on Yahoo must be much better than my own. I havn't sold with eBay in almost 2 years but checking the completed auctions the sellthru rate for sportscards is well over 50% on eBay. My sellthru rate on Yahoo is about 10% at best. I left eBay becaue it was too much work for the money, but paying $80 to list 200 items on Yahoo (.40 X 200) would be a complete disaster.
posted on January 17, 2001 03:05:49 AM new
Spreland- yes, even a 50% sell through rate isn't good enough at those prices, huh? The scales on Ebay were ALREADY tipped against sellers of low-dollar items (well, in my opinion. others may argue that point.) but now...now you can just forget it!! Even if your Ebay sell through were 100% it might not be worth it depending on what your profit margin is! And it's not like you can raise prices on an item like a sports card or a plastic toy to cover the difference!
Your post put things in perspective, because I've seen most sellers here say that they are on their way back to Ebay. I take it you aren't. Maybe not everyone is, and I kinda assumed that everyone was.
Yes, I am lucky enough to specialize in items that have been very easy to sell up until now. My ebay sell through rate is pretty inconsequential because lately I list just about everything at $1 to start with. I nearly always have 100% sell through on Ebay, but that's a meaningless statistic. It doesn't translate into actual profit. On Yahoo before the scrambled listing order I had high sell through. (And I don't usually start items off at $1 on Yahoo unless they're featured to high heaven). After the listings got scrambled my sell through % (and my sales in general) took a nosedive. I am once again optimistic now that the listings are de-scrambled, but my Yahoo sell through percent was WAY above 10% to start with.
posted on January 17, 2001 03:53:51 AM new
CAgrrl - I don't consider eBay even as a remote option. Its worse than when I left. I think the majority of sellers who say they're on their way back to eBay were selling on both sites.
posted on January 17, 2001 04:56:39 AM new
yahoo and ebay are doing the correct thing with their listing fees.
Those who complain, most likely never belonged on online auctions from day one.
those 2 sites will be the only sites for
serious bidders and sellers to go to.
unless a real well planned site opens with
100% functions that work and all categories are in place from the beginning.
There must be 1 million auctions that are still running that never belonged in a online auction like yahoo or ebay. let all
those auctions go to the 20 scattered auction sites, and at first glance the users will say wow, look at the numbers jump up.
all that is happening is the final death knell by sites that will be flooded with
cheap non auctionable items.
posted on January 17, 2001 10:58:20 AM new
>>Those who complain, most likely never belonged on online auctions from day one.....all that is happening is the final death knell by sites that will be flooded with cheap non auctionable items.<<
Yahoo never has been a legitimate online auction.I sell items at a fixed price in the $20 to $50 range. The fixed price is set at the same price as completed auctions on ebay. On average, I have to list an item 5 times on Yahoo before it sells for the going rate on eBay. I don't disagree with your point, that some items should not be offered in an auction format, but this is precisely why "those who complain" took their items to Yahoo in the first place.
posted on January 17, 2001 11:12:45 AM new
I don't believe for a moment Yahoo raised its rates to clean house. It's all about Yahoo proving they can generate revenue through means other than advertising sales or drown.
I don't mind paying the extra 5 cents to list on Ebay. My sales have been 80%+ lately with some days (like yesterday) at 100%. Some items go way higher than I predict and that alone will make up for the increase in fees. That's what I call, paying for performance.
Now, Yahoo, on the other hand. We sold 100 items last month. Not so bad except that we had 3 times as many items listed on Yahoo then Ebay. We had a sell through rate of about 10% including the 2 auto relists. To say that it will be cheaper to list on Yahoo is insane. We would pay 3 to 10 times more per item sold listing on Yahoo. January sales on Ebay have been outstanding, but on the other hand sales on Yahoo have been pathetic.
Do we sell our junk on Yahoo and good stuff on Ebay? No. I got rid of all the stuff I didn't think would sell in an attempt to get to the top of the listing order. We were at the top of the listing order in several categories before they put them back in order.
I don't know how your sales are going but I'm watching the categories and am not seeing an increase in bids compared to the drop in listings. Some categories have 40% fewer listings with bids on less than 5% of the remaining auctions.
Yahoo is a bargain if things would sell on first run. If you have to pay for each relist, that kills it.
I predict that Yahoo listings will be at or below 10% of normal a few weeks from now.
I had originally planned on staying at Yahoo and listing less items, but linking to a website that had links to all of our listings on Yahoo, Ebay and elsewhere. It seems that Yahoo has thought of that to because they have closed several seller's auctions and entire accounts for links to their web sites. I ended up taking down my web site because I had no way to edit the links out of my auctions and created a Yahoo specific web site. I read their, updated, guidelines and attempted to comply. Hopefully they won't find any violations that I may have missed.
The Yahoo management has gone off the deep end. I am enjoying watching their site die as the result of it..
[ edited by outoftheblue on Jan 17, 2001 01:00 PM ]
posted on January 17, 2001 06:35:53 PM new
outoftheblue- I am highly upset about all those auction cancellations by Yahoo. I didn't personally have any but I still think that the people who got auctions cancelled should have been given a REASON in WRITING!!! I'm a firm believer in "innocent until proven guilty", and who's to say that maybe some of those auctions weren't mistakenly cancelled? Anyway, I sincerely hope that that doesn't happen to you too!
Yahoo is a bargain if things would sell on first run. If you have to pay for each relist, that kills it. TRUE!!! I agree.
OK, if you can follow my logic for a minute and forget how things were in the past- everything is so different now- imagine what would happen if ALL the sellers of low $$ items, like Spreland & myself, congregated at Yahoo.
There are gonna be lots of Ebay refuges that have to go SOMEWHERE else, or quit, since it was impractical to sell low $$ merchandise at Ebay before, let alone now. If everyone were to make Yahoo their sportscard/beanie baby/fast food toys/postcards/polly pocket/play Barbie/ you get the idea/ site of choice, maybe sell throughs would improve from what they have been. Let's face it, Ebay & Yahoo are the only sites right now that really have lots of buyers. So all I'm saying is that if bargain priced sellers would all sell on Yahoo, and customers knew that, maybe Yahoo users would benefit by being able to sell more on the FIRST listing.
The reality is that none of us are really agreeing on the "best" site to support as we migrate. We are all going to be spread too thin over a bazillion different sites. I think diversity is a good thing, but I also have sincere doubts that the finite number of online auction users can really support a bazillion different sites. I don't think there is enough demand for the huge number of sites that are presently out there. There will eventually be adjustments as lesser-traficked & lesser-funded sites fold or get absorbed by larger sites.
Speaking of which, all of this is moot if Ebay & Yahoo do indeed merge.
posted on January 17, 2001 06:43:09 PM new
Two thoughts about your post, CA
1) What Yahoo! should have done was given notice that they were going to become strict on their rules, then give users a chance to edit their items so they don't get cancelled.
2) A lot of sites are coming into the market because they think they can be the one that does what eBay doesn't. This is why sellers are spread so thin. However, as time goes by, a lot of these sites will realize that they can't cut it and will fold, leaving fewer sites for sellers to go to.
As always, it's been your pleasure
