This is where some of us here disagree with Ilja/iwascoding: right now, there is only one solution, that doesn’t fit everyone. Some will just accept it and pay the fee, some will drop out (and will be lost customers).
If iwascoding decided to offer something for those that are either unwilling to pay the monthly subscription or where that model just doesn’t fit, they would probably lose some of the customers that would otherwise have paid the monthly subscription to this lower priced single payment offer, so a little less income here, but they could keep those who would otherwise look for alternatives (or, like me, just stick to GS7 as long as possible, so are potentially ‘demanding’ customers without paying anything to iwascoding), make them pay a single fee for an upgrade and have in summary more income by targeting more customers, existing ones and potentially new ones.
To me, that still sounds like benefit for both sides.
In your example, if someone onlysells about 10 items per year with 100 items listed: Why would he need a tool like Garagesale to set those 100 items up? You may then also simply start them within ebay and don´t need an additional tool. That should not be so hard to do I think.
You can have hundred of unique items with very specific description that you sell on your own shop, but only 100 listed on eBay for several reasons:
creating listings for unique items takes time, even with GarageSale, which unfortunately doesn’t use a relational database. If GarageSale was relational and published its database structure (tables, name and type of fields) and was able to natively hook an external MySQL/MariaDB database, if would change life for those like me, because SQL requests could be performed in tools like phpMyAdmin. For me, using GarageSale is still very labour intensive, unless I do large batch imports.
If you don’t want to pay a monthly eBay subscription, the fee for publishing a new item (beyond the free ones) is around 0.30 to 0.40$ / depending on the country. So, you might limit the number of items published on eBay to benefit from monthly free listings.
But: What do we all have as a benefit if iwascoding rethinks their subscription model and they have to stop working on GS because they can´t get enough money from GS to live from?
I agree the GS team must find a model that brings enough money.
I’m just telling that there might be other ways to do money than a monthly subscription plan.
I think they have calculated and thought about how to work on, and the may have been calculating that some users don´t use GS anymore then.
Probably. But probing existing customers before applying such major change would have been wise.
But for those who will use GS in the future, it will be good if GS still exists in 2 years.
Hi @Michelle , as far as I know, in invaluable.com and liveauctioneers.com you can’t create your own store as it is with eBay. These are auction houses sites. I would suggest Catawiki, which is closer to eBay; you can add your product when and how you want. There is also Delcampe for paper collectibles which is almost the same of eBay and as far as I know, there are no tools to manage listing over this site. That would be useful…
No, I just saw some of the discussion, not a precise announcement of the different pricing plans, so I would appreciate a link. I take it there will be an upgrade price of (?) xx€ and, of listing more than 50 per month, the need for a subscription at $149 a year. I would chime in that 50 per month leaves little room before the need to leap to $$ subscription, which is aimed at professional users. I always upgraded because it’s great software, but barely use many of the features now, so I’m the perfect example of the user who is being, I won’t say “abandoned” but just squeezed into a 50 listing limit (90% of mine are repeat listings) while still still paying for an upgrade. So I guess it will depend on the cost- I’m lucky to make $50 a month off my usual 150 or so listings… thanks for listening and also for (1) link to last best GS 7 and (2) link to pricing announcement details.
Cheers!
I know about invaluable.com and livecauctioners.com, and (auctionzip.com). That’s what I meant when I said, “…if you want an auctioneer to sell it…” I’ve sold several very high-end items those, and like them, though they have to be high-end in order for me to make a profit.
I forgot about Catawiki; you mentioned it to me a year or so ago when I first started looking for something that wasn’t as controlling as eBay. Does it have enough traffic to make it work?
Will check out Delcampe. I sell a lot of stamps, old notes, and covers.
Hi Michelle,
you are true, I didn’t pay enough attention to it. That’s just such a different selling solution I cannot imagine for my stock, I didn’t took it in consideration for alternatives to eBay, two separate worlds… I also use national auctions for top quality goods, eBay is suitable for little-worths and common ones. Catawiki is a sort of middle solution between auctions and ebay and it has been good for me selling middle-high valuable goods (antiques), much better and faster than eBay where this goods are sold after much time (sometimes years…) and after receiving so many ridiculous offers…
Anyway, I can’t speak about clothes and fashions categories on Catawiki, I never used them and can’t be precise. About antiques it used to work good, better before they increased numbers and had to take non-expert as auctioneers. Sometimes they are quite ridiculous when they choose and give reserve prices suggestions on goods they don’t know at all neither touched before… I would anyway suggest you to try, it worths at least a chance. In my opinion, you should use Catawiki as an auction house under your hands selling well-worth goods, never used for “massive listing” and cannot talk about this… I only absolutely suggest to avoid this platform for little-worth items (less than 50-80€ as reserve) because you cannot set any reserve and risk to sell for very few euros… much better eBay for little items at fixed price…
Concerning Delcampe, that’s undoubtedly a good solution for postcards, stamps (top for low-middle quality stamps!) and paper money. Cannot speak about US market because I don’t follow it, sorry. I don’t work in this platform only because GS does not support it and there are no other working solution for synching active listings with eBay (they had it the past a solution, but it had been a pain and left after a little bit…).