How come eBay does not care about adding GarageSale as a Silver Solution Provider?!
1 Like
We just received the silver badge for eBay US a few days ago. (We only had the bronze badge for Germany before.)
They told us, the silver badge would come with an entry to their 3rd party tools directory at a later point in October. 
1 Like
I would assume bronze, silver and so forth are awarded by the number of users and not the actual effectiveness of the tool.
eBay thus is doing a disservice to its users by implying that the 3rd party providers with a higher award are actual better tools when they are not. eBay is also slowing down the number of listings that can be uploaded in a given time by convincing sellers to use the other long outdated tools. Slower listings mean slower income for eBay. But of course if eBay actually cared they would be offering their own desktop application for free, but with over 10,000 employees and billions of dollars they can’t seem to manage that.
You guys needs to blitz YouTube with a giant collection of instructional videos. There are plenty of videos on YouTube trying to convince people to use various other means up uploading listing to eBay which are much slower. The problem is that newbs don’t know any better. Even many long time eBayers, some with more than 20 years of selling experience are still using eBay’s listing form, meaning they literally threw away thousands of hours of their time.
Since many of these 3rd party videos on eBay are only interested in making a commission via a referral link any comments about GS are often removed by their authors or hidden from other users. I watched one video in which the author claimed his system resulted in a sell through rate of 350% - which he made twice in the video. I wonder what magic he used to list 100 items and to suddenly have 350 items sell.
eBay customer service, which is probably a call center in India, wanted to know what kind of error code I was getting when I asked them about why GS was noy mentioned on the 3rd Party Sellers. eBay customer service is a completely clueless as their management.
1 Like
As far as I understand, the level of the star depends on much revenue your tool generated on eBay. So either a tool vendor would either need have need a lot of users, or user that are selling particularly expensive items to get a good rating.
I tried to get this information from eBay’s so called customer service but of course that went nowhere.
eBay customer service:
“there’s no qualifications for each third party provider for different seller ratings on eBay”
“In eBay we do only have 3 seller levels and these are Top Rated, Above standard and below standrad.”
Even though I provided link to the list of third party providers they got the provider’s rankings of bronze, silver and gold provider levels confused with seller ranking.
LOL, if there are no qualifications why have any ranks or levels at all?
When pressed further they pulled their usual trick of telling you they needed to pass it onto someone more qualified who will email you the answer. Of course they never do email you a answer.
One thing for sure is that eBay gets the lifetime achievement award for incompetence!
Previously iwascoding indicated that the pro version was needed because the upgrade fees were not enough to support 3-4 workers.
Strangely though, the pro version includes picture hosting which cost iwascoding more money. So now iwascoding has to find funds to cover wages and picture hosting for many, many images.
So at what point do you have a enough users to introduce another level of license.
A semi-pro version that lets you list any number of listings, but without picture hosting, syncing or auto cancellation of GTC?
In the U.S. sellers get 250 listings per month without insertion fees.
Not worth paying $14.95 a month to list another 200 items a month and having to pay for services such as picture hosting and syncing that I have no use for.
In previous years eBay held free insertion events of 50,000 or more listings via invitation. Without those GS is a lot less valuable as its not worth paying eBay insertion fees beyond the 250 listing per month due to low sell through rates.
Listing just 50 items a month is not worth my time.
Why do you think our financial situation has changed? Is it because of the new eBay badge?
Nothing has changed, we still have the same number of users, who are listing the same number of listings. eBay has just introduced tiers to there 3rd part dev program.
They’ve had the ratings for years. eBay does not even list bronze providers on its developer page in the U.S. at least.
[quote]
Why do you think our financial situation has changed? Is it because of the new eBay badge?
Nothing has changed, we still have the same number of users, who are listing the same number of listings. eBay has just introduced tiers to there 3rd part dev program.
[quote]
Since the rating depends on the revenue generated and you’ve not increased the number of users then your existing users have somehow vastly increased the number of items they are listing to thus generate more revenue for eBay and / or they are selling more expensive items.
I find that hard to believe as eBay lost 13% of all buyers in one quarter, followed by another 9% in the next quarter. There sales were down 10%, 10% and 20% in three quarters.
That would seem to suggest your new pricing model has been a total failure as all you got for it was a new badge and not more users.
The only way you are going to grow is adding more users, not getting a pointless eBay badge.
It makes little since to make pro users pay for expensive picture hosting services that they don’t want as well as other things they don’t want.
I wonder how much more revenue would be generated by adding a semi pro level for $1 a month with a higher per month limit, or no limit, and without picture hosting, computer syncing or auto cancellation of GTC listings?
The existing pro product is going to appeal to very little users. A basic store owner with 250 listings per month without a insertion fees at $4.95 a month can’t even use their store without forking over another $14.99 a month for a pro subscription.
GS is far less valuable these since eBay got rid of free listing events and instead force sellers to pay for these listings using a store subscription or a per item insertion fee.
Considering Garage Sale is the only real desktop Mac solution, with GREAT customer service I might add, it should be at the top of ebay’s offerings.
1 Like
When iwascoding displayed a bronze award on its website it was no where to be found within eBay’s list of 3rd party providers. They don’t even bother to list any bronze providers.
As to what the badges mean its not fully known. One provider I contacted said I’d have to contact eBay, which would be a further waste of time as their Indian call center knows nothing about it. One representative tried to say it was the features the various providers supply with their tool. All that representative was doing was reading from the list of providers on eBay’s website. Another provider claims its the number of items the tool lists on eBay plus additional factors they failed to provide.
I was previously banned more than once for mentioning GS in eBay’s community forums because the moderators there are so clueless. They apparently thought it was for another listing site.
When eBay had a rash of intentionally charging random listings gallery plus fees they first assume you used their listing form and blame you for not using it right. After you tell them you use GS even though they had no clue what Gs was its the fault of the iwascoding. There has never been documented case of that and if there had been eBay would have pulled iwascoding’s access to eBay’s API. eBay customer service are compulsive liars.
Look at eBay’s support of its own listing tool Turbolister. Dropping Turbolister and putting any tool development on 3rd parties immediately saves them money and props up their short term profits at the expense of lowering long term profits. eBay management goal has always been meeting short term sales goals in order to keep eBay’s stock price up as much of the management’s million dollar bonuses are based on eBay stock. The company is a long running stock Ponzi scheme.
This topic was automatically closed 10 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
Finally, GarageSale has been added to the list of “Silver Solution Providers - US” on the eBay website:
2 Likes