I've been patiently waiting for a free listing promotion from eBay as I have about 800 coins to sell and they are not high value enough for paying listing fees to make sense. I've been doing this for years and it works well enough. So today I finally got a promo for 100 free listings - not nearly enough but it's a start - so I accept it and go to list something and see a fee at the end. Then I go back and check the terms - date is correct, listing type is correct. Then I look at the fine print of the terms. Coins and paper money category are excluded! I've used probably 100 of these promotions through the years and coins have never been excluded. All the other excluded categories are things like vehicles, real estate, weapons-grade plutonium (OK I made that one up), and gift cards. I can't understand why coins are excluded. If they're going to start doing this then my selling on eBay is going to get cut to 50 a month. I hope it's a one-off, but I don't know why they insist on messing around with these listing fees. The more items are listed, the more traffic and sales they get and the more they'll earn on final value fees. People who sell lower-value items need a lifeline.
They've been trying for a while to generate more revenue from the listings themselves and for the past year (for me at least) they have been very stingy with the free listing offers compared to years past
It seems like it comes and goes. The past few months I've gotten a lot of good offers. I remember one even came back to back, which is rare. But since the new year they've been getting stingy again. It's really annoying because just as I start to get some repeat customers then all of a sudden my listings drop off and people forget about me.
Ebay knows they can get plenty of revenue from all the "novice experts" selling rare PMD and die cracks.
Back in 2012 I was getting anxiety attacks from so many free listings. 500-1,000 at a time over and over again. I got compulsive/obsessive over it and at one point had nearly 3,500 items up. I did very well that year, but in the end had to hire an accountant to reduce my taxes which was a huge job. The IRS came after me for nearly $16K which I got reduced to around $1,600 plus $400.00 for the accountant. Never again.
That does sound hard to manage. I just don't have that much to sell, or anything of that value. I'm selling things mostly for a few dollars and it can take months to sell. It just isn't reasonable to pay 35 cents to list each item each month. Ebay really would be getting rich off of me. Just curious, did eBay or Paypal report your online earnings to the IRS or did you self-report?
Pay Pal reported it, I missed it and had to re-file. I went over both limits of 200 sales and/or $20K. Now they are reporting all earnings. It was overwhelming to say the least. I'm now down to a couple hundred items and have to play safely because of Social Security.
When I got a $5 coupon from them last month, coins were also excluded, so there's good reason to be concerned about a policy change here.
I've seen a lot of people talk about these and I've never gotten one. I haven't been buying a lot lately but there was a time when I was. I wonder how they decide who to give them to?
