eBay’s Elimination of Seller Fees for Sneakers Priced Over $100

Offering a global network of shopping all over the world, eBay is among the most well-known online shopping sites since its foundation. It supplies a lively market for millions of sellers and shoppers to conduct transactions every day, making substantial revenues every year. Nevertheless, the significant development of e-commerce has introduced a wave of emerging online markets. To combine its place in the extreme competitors, eBay needs to carefully revise its pricing policy, think about collaboration, as well as examine its rivals. Let’s go into the details below to see what the business changed just recently.

eBay Released Zero Selling Charges

On 17th December 2019, eBay made an extraordinary statement: There will be no seller charges (listing charges) for tennis shoes offered at over $100 in North America anymore. Besides, final worth fees (selling costs) will not be contributed to sneakers with offering cost prior to shipping, taxes, and charges are $100 or above.

Statistically, eBay is such a successful marketplace that experienced nearly 6 million tennis shoes offered in 2019. The figure promises to increase given that about 1.4 million sneakers are signing up with the current listings. More impressively, the business states that it takes just 1.5 seconds for the sale of a tennis shoe to be closed.

eBay Participated in A Partnership with Stadium Item

Another statement followed up is their partnership with Arena Item, a leading tennis shoe, and apparel sales marketplace. This partnership was developed with a view to beginning the “December Drops” series. The series act as a way of celebrating the most hyped tennis shoes of the year 2019. Sneakerheads need to monitor the drops often as they will have the chance to pay less than the market price, $215, for Adidas Yeezy 700 in its 4 release days.

Why did eBay decide to partner with Arena Product to hold this occasion? In 2017, eBay released a program called eBay Authenticate to verify products’ authenticity. This program is used for a large range of items: handbags, watches, fashion jewelry, and collectibles. However, sneakers were not consisted of in the validated list at that time and still not. The company completely depends on the merchants’ excellent faith to note these items. Therefore, teaming up with a reseller owning an authentication system is a must for eBay to boost clients’ self-confidence in purchasing tennis shoes.

Arena Product is such an ideal option for eBay. In addition to its expert authentication system, this marketplace belonged to several organization deals with widely known business. By in this manner, it ended up being a dependable partner for eBay. For example, in 2018, Arena Item was purchased by Farfetch at the value of $250 million, which consisted of cash and Farfetch shares. Farfetch is a large online high-end fashion retail platform. Prior to this acquisition, this reseller also got investment from LVMH High-end Ventures, a financial investment entity operating within the LVMH Group. Teaming up with sneaker experts has effectively proved to improve eBay’s credibility. In partnership with Chris Holbrook, also called Sneaker Jesus, eBay made pre-release of the Air Jordan 11 “Bred” tennis shoe sold out in less than 4 minutes.

eBay Evaluated Its Competitiveness

The short-lived collaboration with Stadium Product is a strategic step for eBay in the context of the fast-paced development of e-commerce. Examples of the expansion of e-commerce consist of resale platforms StockX and GOAT. They went into the online reselling organization quite behind eBay but have slowly taken market share. This has positioned a new hazard to eBay. Especially, GOAT just recently expanded its listings to garments and devices, while StockX draws in more celebrity financiers than ever. This can be discussed by its unicorn status, revealing that the business is valued at over $1 billion. Unfortunately, StockX had to sustain a security breach that jeopardized client data last summer. This incident not only damaged the business’s credibility but also provided its rivals with certain benefits.

Apart from carrying out a competitor research study, eBay has been re-assessing its own position in the e-commerce landscape. The company anticipated getting more than $4 billion in money from offering occasion ticket arm StubHub to Viagogo prior to early 2020. Right before this announcement came out, CEO and President Devin Wenig tendered his resignation from that function after 4 years. He took the helm of eBay after its break up with payments processor PayPal.