Some more repsonses to eBay's rate changes

We mostly sell vintage postcards and photographs, primarily on eBay.

Our sales have remained steady (up to now) since eBay's March 30th changes, and that apparently puts us ahead of a lot of other sellers.   We're selling at roughly the same rate after the change as before. 

However, eBay's lowest fee structure in history has caused the fees we pay eBay to increase by about $75.00 a month minimum, (imagine that) so we're making that much less than we did.  Because of our level of selling we were pretty much forced to upgrade our store subscription; also they did away with the store inventory format and are calling everything fixed price.  And while it's true the fixed price fee for a "premium" store is much less than before, it is still higher than the old Store Inventory Format, which is how we used to list our non-auction store inventory.   We pay eBay more money in fees, with no extra benefit that we can see.

So we've decided on a few other things to do - I have no idea if it will work or not.  Everything is a work in progress

1st - we've tried some other venues in addition to eBay that haven't worked for us, so we're pulling out of those sites, and relisting the better inventory on eBay again

2nd - we continue to investigate other selling venues; right now we're giving Bonanzle every chance to work for us, but so far it has been disappointing. 

3rd - we've kicked around the idea of creating our own store website, but we aren't really sure if that will work or not.  We can do it, we have the ability, but all the considerations involved, plus driving traffic to it, seems a daunting task.  It still may happen, and if it does it probably will be in conjunction with selling on eBay. 

4th - to cut down on fees, we're starting to sell more "lots" of cards.  We've always sold lots, from lots of 2 to as much as 300.  It's a good way to move inventory, but generally they bring in much less per card than selling them individually.  But, if a card is a good card, but hasn't sold & it's been around for awhile, there's a good chance we'll include it in some sort of logical grouping and list as part of a lot.  We're doing this to cut down on listing fees, and hopefully move some inventory.

5th - we're going through our listings, correcting mistakes, and paying special attention to titles and keywords.  Some seem to work better than others.

So we have to attack this on two sides.  We have to drive sales somehow, and we have to get our fees a bit more under control. Right now they are too high.  The trick to controlling fees though, is to do it in such a way that sales are not negatively impacted.  It's a neat tick.