| March 04, 2010 |
 eBay Will Remove Subtitles on Store Listings (Finally) |
| By: Ina Steiner |
| Thu Mar 4 2010 04:36:37 |
 File it under, "Wish You Had Told Me Sooner" (or perhaps, "Wish You Had Told Me at All"). Some sellers received an email today from eBay that included an important message for eBay Store subscribers, though they might not have noticed it if they weren't reading carefully:
"Note that Store Inventory Format listings that come up for renewal between April 5 and May 5 with Subtitle, Bold or Gallery Plus listing upgrades will have the listing upgrades removed. We're doing this so you don't otherwise incur the higher regular price for these listing upgrades which take effect March 30."
eBay announced in January it would eliminate Store Inventory format and said that unless sellers wanted to pay $1.50 for the subtitle fees, which currently cost 2 cents, they would have to remove the feature from all of their listings by March 30. That's when eBay will convert all Store listings to Fixed Price listings.
I've heard from sellers who have spent days trying to remove the Subtitle feature, only to see that the checkmark remain.
An AuctionBytes reader quantified the dilemma facing sellers when they wrote in a Letter to the Editor that a Store subscriber with 1,000 listings who currently pays $20 for subtitles would end up paying $1,500 if they failed to remove the feature from their listings - a whopping 7400 percent increase in fees in one fell swoop!
Ultimately today's news is good news, because it means no nasty surprises on invoices. But for sellers who spent hours or days trying to remove the feature, well - they'll never get that time back.
Immediately following eBay's January announcement about the fee and Store changes, I asked eBay about this very issue, thanks to a reader who recognized right away the potential impact on his business (you can listen to the podcast interview I conducted with Todd Lutwak on January 31st, it's about 9:27 minutes into the interview).
It's a shame it took eBay this long to change its policy. And I sincerely hope it will do a better job of communicating this significant announcement, since there are probably some frustrated Storeowners right now trying to purge their listings of the dreaded subtitle checkmark.
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