Ebay May Wrest Control Of Prices From Sellers

In today's report from eCommerce Bytes:

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/bl...8745155.html

An ebay Expression Survey sent today to some sellers asked for feedback about several practices described in the survey:







I checked "Listing Improvements" in the ebay Seller Hub with this result:




Aside from receiving one email from ebay suggesting lowering the price of a six-dollar listing with free shipping to 99 cents, I had not seen any other "price suggestions" from ebay. Setting prices below the cost of shipping seems like assisted economic suicide.

Stepping back, it is fortunate that ebay doesn't attempt to guess market prices, some apprehension exists that they might. for most stamps appearance and condition have more influence on pricing than rarity. While ebay sales could be used as a data mining source for setting catalog values in the hands of a cataloging expert, the raw data is so badly flawed as to be barely usable.

Valid ebay pricing data would have to exclude stamps with alterations, undisclosed faults, improper condition descriptions and misidentifications. Since bad listings are strongly correlated with specific sellers, someone would have to be mind the store and enforce listing standards.

While some believe that the chaotic ebay marketplace is something new must have never attended a multi-dealer stamp show. While dealers come and go, there are always some around who will cut corners or attempt to con their customers. Reputation is more important when stamp transactions were face to face because the supply of new customers is limited, except at the largest stamp shows. Some store dealers would show different selections of stamps depending on whether the collector was experienced or not or quality conscious or not. Sellers on ebay are forced to show the same listings to all comers. To some extent, fixed price listings are better quality than auctions, but the difference has all but vanished to the frustration of more sophisticated buyers.

How would ebay varying prices based on market conditions work in the stamp market? Under present conditions with sellers documented in other posts, price changes would be likely to trap some sellers into unwanted price cutting. Buyers could be expected to learn how to game the system and wait for downward price fluctuations.

This assumes that ebay can get a fix on market prices and offer only accurate listings. I believe that history is 100% stacked against ebay doing this in collectibles categories. In theory, using techniques like predicting traffic on new highways, workable models could be built, but choice models require some buyer demographic insight and an accurate assessment of seller competence and performance. And, were you stuck in traffic today?

I suspect that a useful collectibles marketplace pricing model is beyond ebay's technical competence, but other companies may someday emerge and be successful. In the meantime, I don't believe this will have much impact on the ebay stamp marketplace unless it becomes collateral damage because of some ill-advised one size fits all decision about who controls pricing.

This obviously helps ebay force turnover. That's good for them, bad for sellers on the mark with pricing on things with a limited audience. Bad for ebay stores, too. It's great for the sleazes with stamps with unremarked faults at big discounts off catalog value.

I agree that ebay can't build a model to properly correlate quality with pricing. This is for all things, not just stamps. They can certainly try to fake it out.

Possibly a good idea for sellers of diapers, but absolute nonsense for sellers of collectibles. ebay continues to chase Amazon's tail round and round.

If what is being sold doesn't have an UPC code associated with it, then most likely ebay's schemes are not going to work well.

Fine for widgets and commodity items, but absolutely useless and a disaster for collectibles of any kind. In fact, I would argue that this approach can ONLY work for brand new merchandise still in original manufacturer packaging. It simply cannot be done for second-hand merchandise or collectibles.

I completely ignore the recommendation emails I get from ebay as they almost universally recommend lowering my asking prices to 99 cents... even for items listing in the hundreds of dollars.

Remember: ebay's only concern is turnover. They could not care less whether a seller loses money on a sale; that's immaterial to them. So they will always recommend lowering prices to increase sell-through regardless of cost.

ebay suffers from the disease of most Web page and ap managers. They can't leave well enough alone. (Though I'm not suggesting ebay is 'well' - their / and paypal fee practices are usurious)

In a sense, the nose of the camel is already through the tent. When a seller relists a BIN item, ebay has taken the liberty of pre-checking the 'or best offer' box. Instead of consciously checking that box if that be the seller's choice, now we have to consciously un-check it to opt out. Its a sad attempt by ebay to sneak in lower pricing for their benefit only. This isn't an issue when bulk relisting, only individual store items. As an aside, I don't get the purpose of allowing buyers to make a "best offer." It seems to me that in most cases, the seller will end up taking a lower price even if its good enough, especially for items that have sat for a while. On the other hand, why not just list at the lowest price you're willing to take and leave the 'best offer' nonsense out of the picture?

Fixed priced sellers have built entire business models around Best Offer. Listing stamps at the lowest acceptable selling price is a good way to minimize cash flow. Air lines abandoned this model years ago in favor of Ramsey Pricing giving the airline an opportunity to capture some of the consumer surplus created when the cost of the seat is lower than its value to the buyer. Offering stamps at a fixed price with best offer gives buyers an opportunity to purchase the stamp at a lower price, but maybe more than the sellers "minimum" price. Without Best Offer, stamp prices would stagnate at the high end of the range with a few sellers at a time lowering prices to snag some buyers. Best offer gives every buyer an opportunity to offer at a lower price instead of having to search at the right time.

I believe that sellers and buyers benefit from Best Offer.

There is simply no way that ebay could get either of these proposals to work in the collectibles area, that I see, nor would I want them to.

Now, if they want to offer a feature to assist sellers in researching a potential price for their product, that's fine, but enforcing pricing is, frankly, disgusting.

I agree that the Best Offer feature is good.

Rev Collector understands these markets extremely well. This proposal is an imitation of "automated pricing" from Amazon. I use automated pricing for every SKU I sell on Amazon. As Rev said, the scheme works very well for commodities but is useless for collectibles except perhaps new issues.