Oodle Blog » Blog Archive » Listings Want to be Free

Posted by Craig Donato on August 20th, 2008

In a previous post entitled “Listings Want To Be Free,” I discussed how “up front” pricing and “fixed fees” will soon be business models of the past.

This morning, another key chapter of this story unfolded — eBay announced it is reducing its fee structure on “buy it now” listings

Upfront listing fees will be $.35 in September (a 70% decrease).

Listings will now be online for 30 instead of 7 days.

While press discussion has largely focused on eBay’s move into fixed pricing from the auction business, what’s more important is their transition to monetizing their business through the back-end transaction fees.

In short, eBay’s model is aggressively moving from a pay-to-publish to a pay-for-performance model. Given that eBay is such a large player in the market, we expect that this move will accelerate how pay per performance models are adopted – not just in merchandise (eBay’s mainstay), but in other listings categories as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 10:34 am and is filed under eBay, Oodle.

2 Responses to “Listings Want to be Free – Update”

August 21st, 2008 at 9:03 am
Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog » Blog Archive » Will free-to-list ever replace subscriptions? says:

[...] Donato, founder and CEO of Oodle has written some interesting posts on the future of free-to-list and his opinion on where it can/will [...]
December 7th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Anthony says:

The decrease of listing fee is a good idea eBay come up with in a long time, I think this move will drive more seller to eBay and eBay will keep more seller.

I’m still waiting for the day when its a performance base only….

Anthony,