A summary of annual updates at eBay

This year EBay announced new fixed-price listing fees, new media shipping charge limits and gets tougher with new DSR minimums. Plus, the auction giant plans to cut paper payments and enable merchant accounts for direct payments in a new checkout system this fall.

This year eBay has really shifted its focus to buyer satisfaction — often at the dismay of many of its sellers. Today's big eBay announcement shows that eBay is still on track and fully committed to keeping its buyers happy.

Starting Sept. 16, eBay will be changing its pricing to reduce start-up costs for sellers. To do this, eBay will lower the listing fee for all items sold in the fixed price format to only 35 cents in all categories, except Media which has been reduced to a 15-cent insertion fee.

Sellers can also take advantage of a special 5-cent rate on Buy It Now listings in the Media categories using pre-filled item information until year-end. The listing duration of all Buy It Now fixed price listings is also being increased to 30 days, up from seven, with an option for automatic renewal. With the new fees this enables sellers to list in Buy It Now fixed price listings for 30 days at 35 cents.

There is the decreased listing fee which is good news for sellers, but unfortunately there will also be changes to Final Value Fees (FvF). EBay is shifting the costs to sellers by way of final fees instead of listing fees.

More in another post.