How to manage it!

You may have missed it, but eBay’s “Early” 2019 seller update arrived a few days ago, and starting this month, sellers will no longer have a variety of duration options for fixed-price listings.

Instead, all of them will be listed as “Good ‘Til Cancelled” when created. The problem with this is that Good ‘Til Cancelled listings on eBay:

• Expire every 30 days
• Immediately relist themselves, automatically, if inventory is available
• Incur a new listing fee each time this happens

The effect of this change for some sellers will be what amounts to recurring billing.

Unless you’re careful to log in and manually cancel fixed-price listings that don’t result in a sale, they’ll get relisted every 30 days until they do.

In the past, they’d have simply have expired if they didn’t sell. Now, they’ll result in new listing fees incurred month after month, indefinitely.

So what are sellers supposed to do? There are two ways to handle the problem.

Add a New Task to Your Calendar

One simple way to eliminate this problem while still using the fixed-price format is to schedule yourself a new weekly listing check.

Once every week, log in and scan your seller account for:

• Listings that have been online for weeks
• But haven’t resulted in a sale
• And are nearing 30 days old

Find these listings and cancel them if you don’t want to pay to have them online any longer—or at least not right now.

Yes, this is a lot of new extra work, especially if you’re already weighed down by listing management tasks.

The good news is that there’s also a software solution to the problem.

Use inkFrog’s New GTC Watchdog Tool

inkFrog must be really on top of things because hours after eBay’s update, they introduced a new tool called “GTC Watchdog” that helps you to automatically manage Good ‘Til Cancelled listings. It works like this:

• You create rules that GTC Watchdog will use to cancel listings
• In each rule, you specify a category, price range, and eBay marketplace
• In each rule, you also specify a cancel time, counted in days before relisting

Whenever inkFrog notices one of your listings in a category, price range, and eBay marketplace that match a rule you’ve created, it cancels that listing for you at your appointed cancel time.

This lets you do things that aren’t “officially” possible, like a 29-day duration across all of your fixed-price listings, using a rule like this:

• For all my fixed-price listings in all categories, price ranges, and marketplaces
• Cancel 1 day before automatically relisting

Set that up and bam, your fees are no longer affected by eBay’s recent change and you’ve effectively got a 29-day, non-recurring, fixed-price listing format.

inkFrog has a blog post with more about how their tool works here.

Just Don’t Get Hit with Unexpected Fees

Either way, be sure that you do take the fixed-price listing change into account going forward.

Otherwise, you could end up with an unhappy surprise—a whole bunch of unplanned eBay listing fees—in the months to come!