Ebay Ups Fees! what\'s a painter to DO?

[blurr]

Hello all.

Long time member and lurker but first time poster. (bit shy) Forgive me if this is being hashed elsewhere. If so please direct me to the discussion.

As many of you know ebay has decided to raise thier listing fees. Many of us here sell on their site and I was wondering how you may feel about them taking an even deeper cut.

I think we prety much work for peanuts when we sell on ebay and thieir new fees would reduce our earnings even more.


What about having a CMoNbaY,???


Any comments?

 

[TAB Studio]

welcome to the crowd blurr

Yes it is shameful the increase I was aghast.
The gallery fees etc is hard to choke down. Heck selling unpainted minis is almost worse at least if you have some talent you can recoup some costs.
It will call for higher handling fees which suck for all but if you start an auction at .99 cents you have to recoup the fees guaranteed somewhere. eBay also bought Kurant shopping and are very happy with their revenues in the letters I get. I feel a bit raped myself.
Heck We host alot of stuff.... I will offer to host a cmon groups auction thing....
You have a good point
But anyways welcome (when I was new here and yes I lurked a while at the forum as well but, it is much more game to get involved). There are alot of very kind peeps here.

 

[Torath]

How much is it suppose to go up? I think the Idea of a CMON action would be nice so that way it would cut the cost for advertising your work and contribute to the site Sound\'s like a win win

 

[Frustrated Father]

As Tab said, for the most part people are going to start adding that on to their S/H fee\'s I\'m sure, which simply put, sucks for us but such is life.

If you post pictures with them, the best option is to host your pictures somewhere like Photobucket and used HTML and avoid the picture fee\'s (other than the initial free one that is). Will save some cost, especially on multiple items.

 

[Wappellious]

ebay raising fees

As of February 18th the commission fees on the first $25 of a sale will go from 5% to 8%, while the commission on anything above $25 will go up from 2.75% to 5%.

Also, as mentioned previously, other basic listing fees are being raised... photos, supersize images, you name it.

I\'m not looking forward to that

It\'s gonna be lots more \'spensive now:wow:

 

[Minigrrrl]

what it means is you\'ll need to be carefull what you sell really. I only ever put stuff up i know will sell for atleast £4 unpainted, and my painted stuff raises enough cash to cover the costs. i refuse to count the extra costs toward my customers though, but for me it doesn\'t really matter, cqause my ebay costs will go towards my expenses bill at the end of the tax year...

 

[finn17]

The idea of a CMON eBay sounds good...

But I don\'t think it would work. With eBay, at least you know you are getting the most for your item in a world-wide market. I know that can fluctuate from day-today however. The CMON community is too small to ensure that minis will get their full value.

As someone who generally buys from eBay, I would really welcome the idea, because I am pretty sure I could get things at much lower prices...but that would be bad for the community as a whole.

There is always the Trading Post???

 

[Brother Tom]

Thats really disappointing news, I try to sell painted minis on there now and again, but this is really off putting . I thought the fees were bad enough as it is, but now they must really be racking the money in. Unless you do make alot of money from painted minatures its definetly not a good thing (well its not a good thing anyway).

 

[supervike]

sadly...

most of those costs will have to be passed down to the buyers...

I really don\'t understand the justification for the large price hikes, other than pure corporate greed. Moving something from a 5% cut to a 8% cut is an increase of 60%. Seems a bit excessive.

 

[TAB Studio]

Heck as a corp I could deduct a hummer as a lease to The corp..here the bigger larger & weight a vehicle the more you can \"write off\" at the end of the end of the year.
Although making the auto payments durning the year may cause the company to bankrupt and or raise prices to the consumer.
This is not a small jump at all in price it is comparing my matrix to a hummer for my Little business.
Many Bayer\'s are opening web stores to deflect the impact. but as Finn notes the exposure is so vast it is incomparable at this time.

 

[E-Arkham]

I increased my shipping fees to offset the eBay fees. In the end, it\'s not a huge difference. Compared to others I already had extremely low shipping costs especially considering how well I package things (box, foam rubber, etc), so my new shipping and handling rates are still pretty cheap. Plus I always used my website to host the larger images, so didn\'t have extra picture fees to worry about.

The big problem with this price increase is that it means a bigger loss when something doesn\'t sell at all. Every so often, I\'ll have a \"big win\" with eBay sales, but most of the time my painted miniatures sell between 40%-75% of my commission prices -- sometimes not selling at all. Maybe I just don\'t have the notoriety necessary to guarantee the sales, or I\'m not marketing things well enough, or I\'m painting the figures that nobody wants to begin with, but the difference between eBay and commission is a world apart for me.

At the moment, there\'s only a couple of things keeping me interested in selling on eBay: for increasing my audience/advertising my work, for a change of pace or style from commission work, or just to take a shot at the listing being one of the \"big wins.\"

But overall the fee increase isn\'t driving me away from eBay. I may change my mind if my next batch of listings fails to sell at all, however.

Kep

 

[james9487]

That made me so mad when I got that email from ebay. At first I thought,\" oh well, thats just inflation\", but then I realized that inflation is going to raise the price of the auction on its own, so to raise the final selling fee from 5% to 8% is just greed.

 

[mrbuddylee]

I\'ve often thought about creating a auction site solely for miniatures, but I don\'t think that it would take off. Plus, the time involved would be 80+ man hours easily, and I just don\'t know if it\'d be worth it. Then, if you get too much traffic, you have to start charging for the service, then you\'re really no different than Ebay.

Unfortunately, the only way a good alternative to Ebay for painters will come to be is if there is an active push in the community to switch, and until Ebay\'s fees get absolutely insane, that\'s probably not going to happen.

With that said, I seriously have thought about this, but in my head, I just can\'t find a way to make anything compete and keep the cost to the end users near zero. Ebay has (and will probably always have) all the other auction sites beat because Ebay is so well known and draws so many people.

 

[blurr]

Everything has a start. And most things start off small with little hope of ever becoming HUGE like ebay. Cmon started rather small and now its a major force in the mini painting community. I think that a venue other than ebay can be developed and it can include all aspects of the hobby, painted minis, prepainted plastic (yuK!) Rpg rules, etc.

With time, effort and pople like us that beleive in our work and the hobby there is no reason it should utterly fail (whatever new venue is developed). We can do our own promoting of the auction site and steer people in all forums related to the hobby to check out the new venue be it ubid, overstock, CmonBay, whatever...


just thinking...

 

[TAB Studio]

well the site is up for fun if you are blurr
www.thehedgewizards.com
Even if it is just a studio approach of many painters offering the work and placing a small amount of ebay auctions to draw traffic it would be a way around some of the increase of cost.
my email is there if you are interested let me know programming in flash is pretty easy and growth if it happens is manageable with time

 

[Wappellious]

commission fees

While the rise in Ebay fees is going to hurt us, it is still far less than the fees we are hit with in our 2D art.

The standard art show commission rate is between 10-15%, and they charge anywhere from $10 to 500 to have your work displayed for a total of 10 hours over a weekend!

For less than $3, we can have a mini up for a week at 24 hours a day, with an audience of millions, versus a few hundred or a few thousand.

That being said, I am very distressed about the fee being raised so much so fast. If any CMON auction site is begun, I would be willing to give a try.

CMON is certainly much bigger than when we first joined last summer. I think it has more than doubled since then.

Here\'s wishing good luck to us all-

 

[Joshua]

lol you have to pay to display your minis on cons? i thought it was just for the sake of having a few nice looking minis to lure some people to the con :\\
i think the problem with a cmon ebay would be that. as already mentioned, it would have only a few people paying attention since none of the big names would really switch to cmonbay because they have to make a living with their work.
cmonbay would mean a huge decrease of the al-lighty-ollar in the beginning and finally, most of the people attending cmon are painters themselfs
ok 8% is SHAMELESS but all we can do is getting along with it, i dont think an increase of the p&p does any good, i usually dont charge the buyers more $ than the shipping costs anyway, for international buyers i\'m even paying additional €1 because i think that the humungous €12 international shipping really scares international bidders

 

[KatieG]

Calm down and actually read the new fee increases!

Hey guys,
I\'ve seen this discussion before, and all I have to say is, CHILL! There are no fee increases for typical auction style format auctions! There is an increase for the gallery option (which I haven\'t found particularly useful anyways) and the final value increase they are talking about from 5-8% is FOR YOUR EBAY STORE, not on typical auctions. The only other difference is if you use the buy it now... if you find it useful (and worth the new price) keep it and if you don\'t, then don\'t use it... pretty simple. I\'ve copy-pasted from the message eBay sent me below:

The fee changes are as follows:

Gallery
Gallery fees will be raised from $0.25 to $0.35 per listing. We will also be increasing the size of the Gallery image on search and listings pages by 56%. This will make it easier for buyers to see details of the item before clicking into the listing.

Buy It Now
Buy It Now fees will no longer be charged at a flat rate, and will instead be determined based on the Buy It Now price. Fees will be charged as follows:

Buy It Now Price Fee
$0.01 - 9.99 $0.05
$10 - 24.99 $0.10
$25 - 49.99 $0.20
$50+ $0.25


10-Day Duration
The fee for 10-day duration listings will be raised from $0.20 to $0.40 per listing.

eBay Stores
The fee for the Basic eBay Store subscription will be raised from $9.95 to $15.95 per month. The subscription fee for Featured and Anchor Stores will be unchanged.

eBay Store Inventory format listing insertion fees will remain unchanged. The Final Value Fee for Store Inventory items will change as follows:

[A bunch of changes that I didn\'t copy paste because they\'ll just get messed up anyways since they\'re in a table format]

Insertion and Final Value Fees
The insertion and Final Value Fees will be changing for items listed in certain Business & Industrial categories. More details about the changes for these categories are provided below. The insertion and Final Value Fees in other categories will not be changing.

Unless you regularly use the gallery and buy it now, or have an eBay store, these fee increases will not effect you. And even if you do, you can decide whether those special goodies are worth the extra money, and use them if they are, and stop using them if they aren\'t. It\'s really not that big a deal, and better than when they up the listing fees .

--Katie G.

 

[beowulfthehunter]

thank you for clearing things up. I guess it would have to be a woman who was level=headed enough to expalin thigs to us. Al most wants to make a guy propose.

 

[TAB Studio]

I have a store
It was before lucrative to list a few auctions the hope you visited my store it is not so much now and the Monthly rate for the store has almost doubled as well as listing increase and final value fees.
I am not the once in a while kinda of auction at times I have hundreds of store items,and auctions going.
So....... ?
I also agree with Joshua and do not charge handling for Cmon\'ers and internationals cause of the cost. I feel it is good will although more of a hassle to ship and price with emails of surface cost and air cost for them to consider. It makes for great customers