eBay forces sellers to offer free P&P

It's a well-known fact in the Shopper office that I vehemently dislike Apple's tactics when it comes to squeezing their customers for more money. Charging iPod Touch owners for firmware upgrades, for example, is a despicable practice when iPhone users get them free.

Now, eBay is at it again. I was clearing out a cupboard over the weekend and decided to sell a few things rather than throw them away. One item was an old foldable keyboard for a PDA, which I thought could fetch enough to be worth the hassle of listing. I set what I considered to be a fair price for postage and packing, only to see an error message telling me 'P&P cost for this category cannot be more than £0.00'.

I'd seen no warnings or messages to inform me that certain categories would be switched to free P&P, so it was a nasty surprise. Searching Google revealed hundreds of angry forum posts on the subject, plus eBay's official page detailing the change.

No fewer than 39 categories now have forced free P&P including clothes, shoes and accessories, video games, mobile and home phones, consumer electronics, computing and photography.

According to eBay, the change has been introduced since people now expect free P&P when shopping online in these categories, and it will benefit sellers because shopper's are more likely to buy your items than if you charged for postage.

This is surely a thinly veiled excuse for eBay wanting a bigger cut of the sale, since most sellers will have to find a way to increase the final sale price of their items in order to offset the loss of P&P. As one forum poster correctly observed "there's no such thing as free P&P – if you don't believe me, go ask the Post Office".

While frustrating for me, the switch is much more serious for businesses selling brand new items, especially heavy ones that cost a lot of money to post. Ebay already takes a big cut of the sale by charging a listing fee and a final value fee, which can combine to be more than 10 per cent. Any business that uses PayPal (a subsidiary of eBay) to receive payments gets a further chunk removed from the total, and I won't be surprised if many sellers decide this is the final straw and find somewhere else to sell products.

The biggest insult, though, is the way eBay tries to sweet talk sellers into continuing to sell in these categories. As well as final value fee "promotions from time to time" – whatever that means – "sellers should also bear in mind that the requirement to offer free postage & packaging applies only to the first domestic P&P option. Further chargeable shipping services can be offered in addition." I somehow doubt any buyer will opt to pay for delivery when they can get an item delivered for free. Plus, the onus is on sellers to ensure goods arrive safely with buyers, not the other way around, so there's no incentive for a buyer to pay extra for insurance when they can request a refund if the item doesn't arrive via an uninsured delivery method.