Ebay are becoming more and more greedy, and with Royal Mail also taking their price hikes sky-high, it really is a battle for us, and many other small businesses out there.
Please shop directly through our website, where we still accept PayPal payments, so are just as secure as eBay - but there's no fees to pay, which means we can bring you the products cheaper. There's also 3000 more products on our website currently, than there are in our eBay store.... I will give a little more information below:
This point is for us, a main point in why we are going to have to consider removing our products:
From 4 September, if your item sells, you’ll be charged a final value fee based on the total cost to the buyer, including postage, packaging and other related costs.(-Ebay, quoted from here: http://sellerupdate.ebay.co.uk/autumn2013/fee-changes )
To manage any fee increase you may see, we recommend you include postage as part of your item price and offer items with free postage. You may be able to achieve lower postage costs by exploring alternatives to your current postage supplier.
- What this means, is that we have a 99p item on eBay, (for example a black top hat), we currently charge the customer £0.99 + £1.00 Post and Packing.
eBay currently take 10% fee off of the item price, not the p&p.
Now what they are saying, is that the final value fee (the percentage they take) will now ALSO include the p&p charges (I fail to see WHY they should benefit from this) - so they suggest adding the cost of postage to the item to the item cost, making the hat effectively now £1.99 with "Free Postage", and they will then take their final value fee from the £1.99, not the 99p, which is clealy more; therefore we will be forced to up the price, or lose our profit. So we'd have the choice of up our prices to customers, or lose our business entirely as our profits would be eaten little by little.
What is also important to note, is that currently if you require e.g 10 top hats, you would pay 99p for each of the hats, £1 original postage cost, and a further 10p per extra hat, which would mean the order would total £11.80 (10 hats at 99p, postage at £1.90)
With the ebay changes, this same order would cost you in excess of £19.90, as the "postage" fee is included with each individual item, not as an order as a whole. This figure is assuming we DON'T increase our prices to compensate for their greed. You would effectively be paying £10 delivery cost for items which cost £9.99... You could argue that it will still only cost us £1.90 to send the parcel, and can take our profit from the extra postal costs, but we're not here to rip people off- we are human, and are customers too- we wouldn't feel loyal to a business if we knew they were pocketing more money than they should be. We're trying to consider you, our customers, as well as ourselves, as without you- we wouldn't be a business at all - just a couple of mad women sat amongst a pile of miniature products!!
The same order on our website would total £11.00... no brainer?
If you have any more info on how YOUR small business is going to cope with the changes, we'd really appreciate some input.
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