Starting Feb. 18, eBay said the monthly subscription fee for people who operate “Basic eBay Stores” will increase from $9.95 to $15.95. For many sellers, the stores were basically a marketing tool, or an add-on tool to their auctions, since store items didn't come up in searches, so this is an increase that is causing many smaller stores to close.
The fee for a standard listing of 10 days will double, from $.20 cents to $.40 cents. The Gallery photo fee increases to $.35 from $.25, and items with "Buy It Now" ("BIN") prices of $.01 to $9.99 still have a $.05 fee; however, this fee now goes up at a sliding scale, and maxes out at a steep 25 cents for items with "Buy It Now" prices of $50 and up--this is a 400% increase for the BIN fee for any doll or other item over $50!! Personally, I always used BIN to encourage bidding (once someone would bid or go over reserve, BIN would go away). As a buyer, if I'm buying a gift, I'm often impatient and don't want to wait for an auction, so I look for the BIN! This BIN increase will force a fundamental change in the way many sellers and buyers of dolls do business on eBay.
eBay will also raise final value fees on all items sold through eBay Stores. For example, the fee for items that sell for between $.01 cent and $25 will go to 8 percent of the closing price from 5.25 percent.
One ironic note on the fee increase--eBay also announced that it will "lower the insertion and transaction service fees on pocket bikes from $30 to $3 each." That's right, on pocket bikes. Many in the eBay community think that this change was made so eBay could say in their terse, scripted e-mails to users complaining about the fee increases that some fees actually went down.
