Tonight, we made the decision to close our EBay shop.
Our initial hope had been to use EBay as a source of advertising, thinking that potential customers would do some research about us and find our website.
This proved not to be the case. Our sales were reasonably good through our EBay store but EBay is not the best place to be selling the low cost items we sell. Their fees structure hits us quite hard because there is a ‘per item’ fee and then a ‘final selling price’ fee.
In our case, the initial listing fee made up a comparatively large proportion of our costs. If our products cost more, we would still be charged the same ‘per item’ fee. Of course, this means that in terms of percentage values, we are paying much more. The fee is a fixed amount, so a 10p fee on an item costing £1 is 10%. If the item cost £5, the percentage would be significantly less.
Of course, we then have no choice but to pass on the costs to our customers. Something we really hated doing. In fact, for a while before making the decision to close, we had been selling several items on our website for less than we had to charge on EBay. With luck, some people noticed this and went for the website instead of Ebay.
Currently, we still have some listings on EBay. These will be around for another week or so but after that, you’ll find everything on our website!