eBay briefed me today on changes that it was announcing publicly at midnight (Eastern). I'm scrambling to get all the news into Newsflash. The press release mostly talked about pricing changes, but there were five areas of change covered: Pricing; Finding; Shipping; Seller Standards; and Payments. See the homepage for stories (and check your inbox if you are a Newsflash subscriber).
Analysis: One of the major changes was the price change of BIN Fixed-Price format to a flat 35 cent insertion fee (and the change in duration from 7 days standard to 30 days). While it's a core format, in some ways, this is as if eBay took Stores, raised listing fees (which currently range from between 3 cents to 10 cents for 30 days) and made them 35 cents for 30 days; moderately tweaked FVFs (raising in some categories, lowering in some small instances in certain categories); and exposed the listings to Core search. eBay Stores also have a monthly subscription fee, which BIN Fixed-Price listings do not.
Just to be really clear, eBay did NOT do this - Store inventory remains unchanged; auction format remains unchanged. What is changing is the BIN Fixed-Price format in core. You really have to read the article first, so here's the link.
I asked Dinesh Lathi of eBay's Selling Team and Jeff King of eBay's Finding Team about revising listings, for sellers who may want to move multiple listings from Stores to the new fixed-price format on core. Jeff King followed up in an email:
