Although there are several good points to eBay's recent announcement, make sure you read everything before getting too excited. The major points for listing fees include lower insertion fees, making gallery photos free and reducing fees for gallery plus, picture pack and feature plus services, effective Feb. 20, 2008.

For example, insertion fees for auctions starting at $.01-$.99 were $.20 and will now be $.15, while insertion fees for items $200-$499 were $3.60 and will now be $3.00. Also, the gallery function used to cost us $.35, but will now be free. Gallery Plus used to cost us $.75, but is now lowered to $.35. Bottom line: It will cost us significantly less to list items on eBay. Great news, right?

Unfortunately, final value fees have risen significantly also. Fees are based on the closing price of the auction and used to be 5.25% for the first $.01-$25 of closing value. They will now be 8.75%. Final value fees for a closing price of $25.01-$1,000 were 5.25% of the initial $25, plus 3.25% of the remaining balance, but will now rise to 8.75% of the initial $25, plus 3.5% of the remaining value.

Here's a couple examples for a $20 item and $100 item (starting price of $.99):

• $20 Item before 2/20: $.20 + $.35 Gallery + $1.05 Final Value Fees = $1.60
• $20 Item after 2/20: $.15 + Free Gallery + $1.75 Final Value Fees = $1.90
• So it's $.30 more to sell an item for $20.

• $100 Item before 2/20: $.20 + $.35 Gallery + $3.76 ($1.32 on first $25 + $2.44 on remaining $75) = $4.31
• $100 Item after 2/20: $.15 + Free Gallery + $4.82 ($2.19 on first $25 + $2.63 on remaining $75) = $4.97
• So it's $.66 more to sell an item for $100.

I don't want this to be a negative blog (coincidentally, I should mention that selling something for $10 is a nickel cheaper under this new fee structure) because there are some nice positives in this announcement concerning feedback.

The most important one in my opinion is that negative (or nuetral) feedback left by the buyer will be removed for transactions in which a buyer doesn't respond to the Unpaid item or if the member is suspended. This means sellers no longer have to fear filing unpaid bidder alerts to recoup their fees only to get negative feedback from a buyer who hasn't even paid for the item. Another plus is that positive repeat customers feedback will count. The one I'm still hedging on is that buyers can only receive positive feedback from a seller. While this stops sellers from leaving retalitory negative feedback, it seems to ignore the fact that there are a lot of bad buyers out there. However we feel about any of this though, we've got until Feb. 20 to get used to it.