How we will cope with the future madness

On Jan 26th eBay announced changes in the fee structures for selling on their site, beginning March 30th.  A lot of sellers in the eBay community went ballistic, one going as far as to annouce they were putting all their stuff on sale, and would have a fire sale of sorts for anything that was left in March, and then would close down their store.  Well, if they had anything I wanted to buy, I guess that would be good for me.

I don't trust people who go ballistic.  Nothing ever remains the same, and anyone who expects everything to remain the same is living in some other reality.  Every year to 18 months, eBay fiddles with the fee structure.  It's going to happen, and we just have to deal with it.  Nothing I say or do is going to influence eBay, and if I decide to quit in protest, they would care less.   If I were a fly, they wouldn't even bother to swat me.

This change is major, however, and it's making us look at the way we do business.  I don't know if the way we do business is the best or not, but it works.  We make profit, and it provides a nice supplement to our income, but perhaps, especially with the rule changes, we could do better.  That's what we have to figure out. 

We'll almost certainly have to upgrade to a "Premium" store membership, because of our volume.  Right now we have a "Basic" store membership.  That means a $33 higher initial payment or so, and listing fees for store inventory are going up 2 cents an item.  But the auction fees will be reduced, and we've determined that if we make no changes & continue to do business the way we currently do, our total monthly fees will be fairly close to what they are right now - maybe a little more, or perhaps a little less, depending on sales and such.  So I'm not too worried.   If we stay with a "Basic" store and make no changes, our fees will go thru the roof, we would lose money.  So the forced upgrade is a bit of a no-brainer.

Last night, for the first time ever, we tuned in to an eBay internet radio town hall, where these changes were discussed.  The corporate people did a pretty good job of not really answering anyone's questions to anybody's satisfaction, or just giving back canned answers (see - I can be cynical).  A lot of the callers did a good job of being very rigid and unwilling to make any kind of changes in the way they do business.  

I'm sorry, but we won't be having any fire sales.  We're not closing down our eBay account.  We've tried other sites, and it's just not worked out for us, so eBay is what we have for now.  We'll figure it out and make adjustments.