Please delete this if it isn't allowed, but I thought that everyone should be aware of what Ebay is trying to pull. It is especially damaging to small businesses.

starherd.livejournal.com/306304.html

It's a little long, so here's the short version:

- they are reducing the listing fee by 5 cents and making Gallery free. On the surface this looks great, and this is how they are marketing the change - as a "fee reduction". However, if you read the fine print you'll find that they are raising Final Value Fees (The fee the seller pays when the item sells at auction) by as much as 33% to 66% for some sellers.

- if you have below a 95% monthly satisfaction rating on Ebay, Ebay will not display your auctions in the search engine. This seems reasonable until you consider people who don't sell in high quantities. For example, if you sell 10 items one month and 1 of them has a neutral or negative left for it by a buyer (deserved or not), you can no longer list auctions on Ebay and have them show up in the search engine, which makes it virtually impossible to improve your feedback rating since none of your items will ever sell.

- they are removing the ability for sellers to leave feedback for buyers. This despite the fact that many sellers have been burned by buyers who try to extort the sellers by threatening to leave bad feedback if they don't ship something for free, or institute fraudulent chargebacks claiming the item never arrived. This, coupled with the 95% feedback rule, means that one or two unscrupulous buyers can completely ruin a small business' reputation on Ebay and make it impossible for them to continue selling.

- if you have less than 100 total feedbacks or you have less than 95% satisfaction rating, and you sell an item, Pay Pal will not give you your money for 21 days. They are indeed expecting sellers to ship goods without pay, releasing the money only when the buyer gives positive feedback or 21 days has elapsed. How much you wanna bet that many buyers will then claim the item was not as described and have the charges reversed?

- they instituted a 15% discount as a "Seller Reward", but out of Ebay's top 500 Powersellers only SEVEN qualify for the 15% discount according to the criteria given.

Ebay claims that they're only targeting 'problem sellers', but really the ones who will suffer are the small businesses and individuals. Essentially they are making Ebay suited only for large businesses who move tens of thousands of dollars a month, and making it impossible for small businesses, hobbyists and casual sellers to function on the site.

Many sellers and buyers are holding a strike on February 18th through February 25 - that includes no buying, no listing, no selling, no auctions on those days. If you agree that these policies are NOT acceptable, please honour this boycott in order to get the message out.

Article on CNN Money; they're investigating the issue: fsbfeatures.blogs.fsb.cnn.com/200...ion/

"I called in and spoke with ebay yesterday to voice my complaint. I was told that ebay does not consider sellers their customers, only buyers. This is amazing to me since ebay only gets revenue from sellers. The buyers are my customer, not theirs."