An interesting tip from the eBay strategies blog

eBay is concerned about the slow growth of new active users, eBay is going to lower listing fees and take more of a cut after the sale. They recently ran a 2 day test on eBay Motors with no listing fee

This is great news for people who are buying wholesale to sell on eBay, especially dropshippers. Lowering the basic listing fee and taking more on the back end, will allow you to still control your margin and list more dropshipped products

Wall Street has been very sensitive to the fact that eBay has sort of a perfect business model (because they have no inventory, mainly) and Amazon is in a mostly low margin business, with complicated logistics and fulfillment models, yet Amazon is worth more than eBay. The C*O’s at eBay are very sensitive, of course, to what Wall Street has to say about these things. I would think that more than a bit of the slowing growth at ebay is due to sites like Craigslist with no fees, Etsy which works a strong niche and an audience with deep pockets and hundreds of others that offer good commercial outlets in addition to eBay.

Changes to the fee structure are expected in the first quarter of 2008, according to eBay Strategies, probably in late January.  My advice to those of you selling products: take advantage of the after Christmas closeout sales that many of Top Ten’s advertising partners, will be running. Watch this space for more details on this.