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Saturday, July 2, 2011

New Shipping Fees

A couple of months ago, I started offering “Free Shipping” on a few of my items. As anyone with any common sense knows, “Free Shipping” is nothing more than increasing the price of the item to cover the shipping expense. I knew at the time that eBay would benefit by being able to charge Final Value Fees (FVF) on that increase in sales price, but I have found that the sales psychology of offering “Free Shipping” to customers has certainly more than made up for the increase in fees.

So now that eBay will be implementing the new fee policy (FVF will be a percentage of sales price + shipping costs) on July 6, it might be a good time to rethink your own shipping policies. 
Posted by Rae at 7:00 PM
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 2, 2011 at 7:38 PM

    Great insight Rae. It's nice to read a positive side of the increased fees and Free Shipping. Thanks for sharing.

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  2. AnonymousJuly 2, 2011 at 8:46 PM

    Small light items under 2 pounds may make sense listing with Free Shipping, but if you sell anything 3 pounds or over shipped or that require a box larger than one cubic foot in size you will lose your local and International sellers if you increase the price to include shipping. I discontinued offering Free Shipping after losing all my International and in-state Buyers. Combined sales dried up as well. They all came back as soon as I dropped Free Shipping. International Buyers make up 25% of my sales and locals are 10%. Those Buyers are too many to lose so eBay can show an increase in their year to year sales to keep stockholders and Wall Street happy. eBay has begun charging Sellers FVF on shipping to force us to offer Free Shipping to continue this false growth. I will not offer Free Shipping in the near future and advise against it unless you sell small light items and do not care about selling multiple items to a Buyer.

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