eBay made a new announcement again, this time on eBay.de (Germany). eBay is setting the shipping costs limits for each product category. This policy will be effective from June 15 2008.

Auctionbytes recently reported results of a survey conducted by Paypal and comScore, which showed that unexpectedly high shipping fees are the number one reason consumers abandon online purchases.

Have this result directly impact the new policies on postage costs limits decision? A couple of interesting points which I agreed from SpicyTemplates blog is that eBay likes to test new policies on the smaller sites like UK, Germany and Australia before implementing them on eBay USA. One very good example is the Detailed Sellers Ratings which uses eBay UK as the guinea pig.

Another point worth noted is under the category Wholesale & Metalworking, max 8 Euro. I do sell wholesale and usually these are bulk items. Shipping one boxes of this (if it’s really metal) is not light at all and they are more work in packaging, not to mention the higher material costs.

But I have several other questions in my mind now.

How can we expect each sellers items are of same weight (across all categories), even the packing materials could weight differently, which results in different postage costs.

If this policy is successfully implemented on eBay Germany, will we soon see that applied on eBAY USA as well? How will eBay execute this as there are many international sellers on the site? How can eBay justify for them what is the postage limit?

Is eBay trying to scrap our packing material costs? Are we not taking into account our time and costs of getting to the post office anymore?

Will the sellers increase the selling price which will in the end means more fees?

Whatever it is, the world is not a dead end. I’m sure there will be more solutions coming up from the experienced marketers and one thing for sure, you really have to confirm you are getting the lowest price possible for your product costs (that includes your stocks and packaging materials).