Is eBay making it harder to sell low-end items?

There’s been a lot of debate recently about whether eBay works as a selling venue for non-collectible books and other inexpensive items.

Lots of eBay sellers have a store to park slow-moving books at fixed prices. But the fees add up, and despite the recent changes at eBay, overall fees are continuing to go up.

The fees changes that are coming next month have been advertised as a reduction in fees, but take a look at this analysis:

Auctioning an item at $25 would have cost the seller $1.91, including 60 cents for insertion fees plus eBay’s final-value fee commission of $1.31. So under the new program, the seller pays $2.74, including 55 cents to list the item plus a higher commission of $2.19.

As you can imagine there are a lot of unhappy sellers:

Carol Hearn, who sells antiques on eBay from Washington state, said … “It looks like what they are trying to do with the fees is make it more difficult and expensive to sell low-end items. The people that are selling low-end items are going to feel this fee increase the most,” Hearn said.

My prediction is that eBay is going to make its site increasingly attractive for the megaseller — at the expense of the small and part-time seller. eBay makes 80 percent of its revenue from the top 20 percent of its sellers.

In December Amazon’s traffic surpassed eBay’s for the first time.

Are the changes at eBay going to result in fewer listings and fewer buyers?

Related posts:

1. Is it still possible to sell books on eBay at a profit?
2. eBay offers 10-cent auction fee, free gallery on Store items