How To Survive on eBay.co.uk
After the 25^th September!  
New eBay Rules Are Coming

eBay is removing the 15p fee for the Gallery listing upgrade. So basically they’re making the current special offer permanent – which is great, of course! I just hope that you're not one of those sellers who still don't use gallery pictures – especially for FREE!!! Just take a look at the eBay search results – there are plenty of listings without the gallery pictures and those sellers are not even aware that they're loosing on loads of potential profit simply because they haven't ticked the Gallery Picture checkbox.

eBay retires the “Shop Inventory Format” - this basically means that all the listings in search will be equally sorted by the 'best Match” algorithm.

Insertion fees for BIN listings

As promised by eBay, they're lowering the insertion fees for Buy It Now listings. The new fee structure will greatly benefit the volume sellers as well as highly priced item sellers and those who list many identical items. The new fee structure is not based on items’ price at all! There's a very simple, easy to understand scheme – the more you pay for the Shop, the lower will be your listing insertion fees. As low as 1p for Anchor Shop owners. How's that sound? Just 1pence for listing a 2000 quid plasma TV?

Of course, not many of us have Anchor Shops, – but even with a Featured Shop you can get some really nice discounts – just 5 pence fixed fee for anything you sell!

And that's not all – from now on, we can choose listing duration up to 30 days for the same, low fixed insertion fee. There are 6 options available:

* 3 days
* 5 days
* 7 days
* 10 days
* 30 days
* 30 days Good Till Canceled

So now it's really much easier to know how much you have to pay as everything is covered by the same rules with only one exemption - “Media category”. The fees in this category differ from the general ones.

This all sounds good but where's the catch? Is there one at all? Well, it depends on how you look at it. A clearly negative change can be found in the Shop fees and the Final Value Fees.

Final Value Fees will increase across all the categories (except Technology and Media Categories). As you can see from the table for BIN listings – there's a very dramatical increase in FVF if the product's price is below 49.99 pounds. So if you're selling products in that price range, make sure you're taking the advantage of this. FVF for a 45 quid item will be 4.46 but for 50 quid item only 2.95 pounds.

The same principle applies on auction listings – if the final price is below £29.99, the Final Value Fee is calculated at 8.75% but for items with the final price of 30 pounds and higher, just – 5.25%

Shop Fees

From the 25th September your eBay Shop's fee will be more like a monthly payment which in turn gives you substantial listing fees’ discounts. It comes at a cost, though:

Basic Shop's monthly fee will increase from the current £6 to £14.99
Featured Shop's monthly fee will increase from £30 to £49.99
Anchor Shop's monthly fee will increase from £300 to £349.99

So which Shop subscription you should use? In fact, it's a very simple decision! You should choose your subscription level based on how many listings you submit to eBay each month:

	0-74 listings per month - No Shop
	75 – 226 listings per month - Basic Shop
	227 – 7499 listings per month – Featured Shop
	7500+ listings per month – Anchor Shop

Of course, each Shop subscription gives you other advantages, like how many custom pages you may have, free scheduling, traffic reports, telephone support etc.

So if you’d like to have a telephone support without being a PowerSeller, you could just opt in for the Featured Shop and – the problem’s resolved!

Listing Upgrades

Want to get more out of your auctions? You could consider using some paid upgrades to enhance the visibility of your items in search results.

Most of the upgrade fees stay at the same level as before. The 30 day BIN listing upgrades will cost just 3 x more than the regular 10 day listing upgrades.

There's also a new upgrade available - “Featured First” which costs £44.95 for up to 10 day listings or £134.95 for 30 day listings in general categories and £11.95/£35.95 in media category.

Also, from the 25th September the International visibility upgrade will be removed for BIN listings. So if you want your BIN listings to appear on eBay.de for example, you have to list on eBay.de directly, accordingly to their fee structure. This doesn't affect the regular auction listings, though.

So What's In There For Me?

Now, when we have covered the most important changes, the question should arise – how can I make the most out of the new changes? Well… It's a very good question indeed and only the time will tell what the best answer is...

The problem is that many sellers will think: “Hey, the listing fees are so small! I'll get “Featured Shop” and list hundreds of listings per day!” But they will miserably fail... Why? Because of the “Best Match Algorithm” which is now default across all the eBay sites.

You see, eBay make all these changes with a purpose. eBay marketplace has become very huge in recent years, with millions of active listings at any given moment. It was actually a bit weird that the listings’ position in search results was determined ONLY by the remaining listing time. Now, everything changes with “Best Match”.

What is “Best Match”?

To put it simply, it means that the listings in search results will appear based on several factors. No one knows the exact formula apart from eBay, but what we know for sure is that the following elements have a direct impact on listings rankings:

	Title – yeah, I know – it sounds obvious, but yet so many people don't use proper keywords in listing titles. Make sure you use Bay Estimator to come up with the most suitable and profitable keywords.
	Detailed Seller Ratings – this one is huge. From what we have seen, DSR has the biggest impact on your success in search results. So pay a very close attention to all 4 DSR categories and improve them, if needed. The one you really want to focus on is Customer Service – offer e-mail, phone, Skype support. Dispatch goods within 24 hours and use reputable and fast couriers.
	Shipping Costs – rules are simple – if you offer Free Shipping, your listings will get higher rankings in eBay's search results. Probably you have heard recent news that eBay has started setting shipping limits across several categories in US and DE sites. So if you work at a high profit margin, it's really a good idea to offer FREE shipping, at least for domestic buyers.
	Conversion Rate – this one is new as well. eBay have mentioned this several times: offer good products for good prices so that people will want to buy them. I believe eBay monitors the percentage of visitors that turn into your customers. The more visitors convert, the higher is your position in the search results. This is a huge topic and we can't cover everything today. Just remember: make your listings look professional! With a high quality template and clean formatting you really can't go wrong!
	Stock – again, a new factor determining your search result rankings. From 25th September we'll pay fixed a listing fee whatever the quantity or total value of all the goods. Just don't make a mistake by placing 20, 50 or 100 items for sale in one listing. Your search position will be also calculated depending on how many items you have sold versus how many you have in stock. If you submit 20 listings with 100 items each – most likely they won't show up on the first search page!

You see – even though the listing fees will be lowered, you won't have high search rankings unless your conversion rates are very good. It's very important to understand what eBay wants to achieve by implementing these changes. So you have to PLAY by the RULES! If you do, eBay will reward You! So what eBay want? Here's my guess:

eBay want quality listings that sell more stuff! They want fewer listings that sell more items! Why do you think they lowered insertion fee but increased Final Value Fee? So that you sell more stuff from a single listing! eBay is continuously moving towards the Amazon Marketplace model and BIN listings will play a huge part in this plan. Sure, auctions will still be popular but more and more sellers use the BIN format.

	eBay want Free Shipping – give it to them!
	eBay want outstanding customer service – just give it to them!

That's it! Just do what eBay want and you'll do fine! The good old times were you could list hundreds of listings for the same product on a daily basis to cover the first page in the search results are over! Now we have to play smart. And I truly believe that the Easy Auction Business community will only benefit from the new changes as 90% of the sellers are not even aware of what's going on!