eBay planned fee hikes in May: Hairless Chris T lied to store owners for months

[mandy]

Auctionbytes article today:

It appears eBay was sending Wall Street analysts signals about impending changes to its fee structure back in May, but caught its sellers off-guard when it actually announced an increase in eBay Store fees on July 19...

The prediction appears to be based on comments made by eBay CEO Meg Whitman and CFO Bob Swan at the Goldman Sachs Seventh Annual Internet Conference the same day. Whitman and Swan discussed "levers" eBay could pull to help it rebalance the marketplace, including pricing levers. In a response during a Q&A session, Whitman said, "We are looking at listing fees, Final Value Fees, insertion fees as all levers that we can utilize to rebalance the marketplace. But at least the current intention is not to reduce core pricing, necessarily."...

full article: http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m08/i11/s01
copy of the Merrill Lynch research report: http://rsch1.ml.com/9093/24013/ds/7876_348.PDF

[sneakymagenta]

"We are looking at listing fees, Final Value Fees, insertion fees as all levers that we can utilize to rebalance the marketplace. But at least the current intention is not to reduce core pricing, necessarily."

:nbiteme: