Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Gunbroker changes

Got this email from gunbroker. They are making some changes to try to eliminate some things that annoy buyers like reserve auctions or exorbitant shipping fees and also to streamline the buying/checkout process. They are going to offer a new "Take a Shot" option to let buyers make a direct offer on items. Bit of a read but should be interesting to those who peruse gunbroker a lot.

Looks like they are also offering incentives to their big sellers at the expense of occasional onsie-twosie sellers, but that's where their money is made so I can see their reasoning.




THE GUNBROKER BUYER EXPERIENCE

Over the last several years much work has been done to improve the buying experience on GunBroker.com. We have substantially improved site functionality on mobile devices. We have improved the site search to provide relevant products instead of more technically oriented keyword-only searches. We have implemented a Checkout system and driven adoption of the Immediate Checkout process to more sellers. We have recently launched our Take a Shot system to allow buyers to negotiate price directly with sellers.

Keep in mind, the buyer is the one who is purchasing your goods. Without buyers you will not be making a sale. Buyers have a lot of choice in where they choose to spend their money. To generate sales the site has to function well and the seller has to deliver in a reasonable amount of time.

Not every aspect of the buyer experience can be controlled through technology or by GunBroker the company. You, the seller, are the one who creates the item listing, sets pricing, ships the product, and provides tracking information. The number one complaint we hear from buyers is the inconsistency of the post-bid process. Some sellers use Immediate Checkout to allow the buyer to pay immediately, without a phone call or need to mail a money order. Some sellers ship quickly and provide tracking information. The sellers who do not make it easy to pay and do not ship quickly or do not provide tracking information hurt the overall buying experience for the sellers who do. It is important to the customer to get a consistent experience regardless of who the seller is.

Effective in December of last year, we made the decision to make thumbnails free on all listings. We are making that change permanent. Thumbnails drive views of the item being sold, and views lead to sales. Sales have been up meaningfully since the thumbnail experiment.

Effective in February of this year, we eliminated identity verification fees for buyers. Buyers disliked those fees, so they have been discontinued. We are still verifying buyers but we are no longer charging the buyers for the verification. Additionally we are streamlining the registration process to make it easier for people to register to buy. More buyers inevitably lead to more sales.

To provide a more consistent experience overall, GunBroker.com is going to implement or increase fees on things buyers hate, like Reserve Price auctions, and 1 Day and 3 Day Auctions. We will be providing financial incentives to sellers who use Immediate Checkout and our current and future shipping options. We are going to announce integrated payments and expanded shipping and tracking options in the coming months to make it easier and faster for buyers to pay, and to keep buyers informed when an item is shipped, when it is expected to be delivered, and when it arrives.


FEE CHANGES

Reserve Price Fees

We are now charging a fee to create a Reserve Price listing, and limiting the amount of time Reserve Price listings can be relisted for free. Buyers do not want to waste their time bidding on what they perceive to be overpriced items which tend to clog up the overall site. We recognize that Reserve Price items have a purpose in some cases so they are not being eliminated. If you do not want to pay the Reserve Price fee, create a listing using Take a Shot to let buyers make you an offer on the item.

1 Day and 3 Day Auctions

1 Day and 3 Day Auctions are being abused by sellers, especially those who use our API to list items for sale. At one time, listings were being sorted from “Ending Soonest” down, so the ending date made a difference. That is no longer the case. Listings are now sorted by relevance. There is no reason to constantly list 1 Day and 3 Day Auctions to stay at the top of the listings. Anyone who lists a lot of product via our API should make sure that they are not using 1 Day or 3 Day Auctions. Instead, use one of our fixed price BuyNow formats.

Elimination of Infinite Relists

We are no longer allowing unsold items to be relisted indefinitely. Unsold items will be permitted to be relisted free of charge for up to 90 days, except for Reserve Price and 1 Day and 3 Day Auctions which have their own rules. If these items are relisted after the initial period, fees will apply. If an item does not sell within 90 days then likely something is wrong: the price is too high or the terms are unacceptable to the buyers in mass. As with Reserve Price items buyers do not want to see a lot of over-priced or otherwise unsellable items.

Excessive Shipping

GunBroker is following the lead of other top ecommerce sites and will begin charging its selling fees on the total cost of the sale including shipping (but not including sales tax). Sellers who use GunBroker’s integrated shipping options will receive a credit back on the fees paid on the actual shipping cost. This policy is meant to discourage sellers from listing a low price and charging excessive shipping to appear to present a lower price to customers or to avoid paying fees. Buyers get irritated when they see an item priced at $450 with $75 shipping, and that hurts the overall buyer experience on the site. Please take the time to set a reasonable shipping price that does not turn off the buyer.

This change is taking effect on July 1, 2018.

Final Value Fees

We have changed our Final Value Fees to provide a base fee structure for all sellers, with discounted fees for our Top 100 Sellers and Top 1000 Sellers. For volume sellers, we will be rolling out tools to help you understand where you rank and what you need to do to get into the next higher tier. Your rank will be re-evaluated quarterly.

This change is taking effect on April 1, 2018.

Immediate Checkout

To qualify for a reduced rate tier, a seller must accept credit card payments through the GunBroker Immediate Checkout feature. We are giving sellers until June 15, 2018 to enable Immediate Checkout on their listings. We strongly recommend that you do not delay. Internet enabled merchant accounts can take a month or more to establish if your current processor does not offer them. GunBroker has partnerships with several merchant account providers and can help you with the technical aspects of setting up Immediate Checkout.


CUSTOMER SERVICE AND MARKETING

Customer Service

GunBroker.com wants all of its customers, buyers and sellers alike, to have the best customer service possible. Over the last few years we have upgraded our support system to use ZenDesk, rolled out real time chat-based support, and worked hard to improve our response times. We are committed to increasing our customer support staff. We are looking to increase our support hours and providing telephone support for our sellers.

Marketing

GunBroker has been increasing its marketing efforts to drive more traffic to your listings. We will continue to step up marketing and advertising efforts to drive more buyers and generate more sales volume.

On-Site and Off-Site Advertising Opportunities

GunBroker is working on a new advertising vehicle similar to other sites’ Promoted or Sponsored Listings. This approach will let you target customers by demographics, interests, and search terms to generate additional exposure to brands and Individual listings. We are setting this up to be a self-service system where you can decide how much to spend and what listings you wish to promote. The new advertising can be run on the GunBroker.com site or on other sites like GunGenius.com. We will announce the new advertising solution within a few months. As a bonus, much of the current ad placements will go away, and we know people are going to be excited about that.

Being only an occasional GB seller, not crazy about the increase in seller final value fees for non-Top 1000 sellers. But other than that, see nothing that really bothers me. I have built my own custom search filters to return, for the most part, what I am looking for. As far as the repetitive 1 Day listers and Reserve Listings up to the BIN price, I have no issue with GB weeding out the guys who are gaming the process. No different than ignoring the Classified Cowboys on 24HCF who bump their classified ads 5 times per day...

I will say that their online support is getting better. I had four "frustrations" with the GB listing format changes that they put in last fall to accommodate mobile devices. Wrote them an email explaining my issues and then closed my account. About 10 days later, got an email back. They had corrected one issue, and then explained how to work around two of the three remaining three issues. Close enough. I started using it again.

Reserved price auctions, extraordinary shipping charges, and postal money orders are all things that discourage me as a potential buyer. It's often bad enough just dealing with and compensating the FFL transfer agent. GunBroker's changes sound reasonable.

Yea those ADHD people that bump a certain thread because they see a leopard Snuggie blanket in the background, unrelated to the item for sale but feel the need to make the connection to some of their forum buddies. Yea that crap gets annoying.

be best if people could keep it "all business" on those ads

Here's what I'd like to see-

If I've already looked at an item in a previous auction (it was relisted), I don't want to have to open it again to find out it's the same POS I've already seen. If I looked at it once and wasn't interested, I never will be interested. Looking at hundreds of guns a day gets real old if they're the same old junk.

Make the little checkmark in the corner easier to see so an old guy doesn't have to squint to see it. (shows you have already seen this item, in this auction)

Make an indicator in the listing of whether or not this item is on my watch list, w/o having to open it to find out. Waste of time.

Bigger thumbnail photos so an old guy doesn't have to squint (Gunbroker, KNOW YOUR MARKET! hint- OLD GUYS!)

Some dude outta Deland Florida
Been trying to sell the same 60% condition model 100 Winchesters (3or4of em) for years.
Maybe the new policy about relist will make people like that get a fugging clue.

Yeah, I'm a onsie-twosie guy myself, just sold a rifle there a couple weeks ago, the last time I sold something was in 2015. It's not exactly cost effective for me to set up a credit card account. But it's still a good place to list items for sale due to the exposure and the fact that it is an auction - you can set a starting bid as low as you will take, and let the market decide the final value. Just going to have to take increased fees into account when determining the starting bid.

On the shipping, folks don't like "buyer pays actual shipping cost" but that's really the best and fairest way to handle it since it doesn't penalize either party. Rifles in particular are getting expensive to ship. It cost $31 and change to send the latest from ID to OK and that was standard ground shipping with full insurance and adult signature. I only charged $30 flat fee so ate a buck or so. But if you start putting $40 or $45 flat fee then the guys close to you are paying a premium to cover the cost of sending it clear across the country.

Sounds like good changes!!!

Looks like a major increase in final value fees for sellers. Used to be 5% of the first 50, then 2.5% for the remainder, not including shipping. $1,000 item = 26.25.

Now or very soon it will be 6% on the first 250, then 3.5% for the remainder, including shipping charges. $1,000 item = 41.25 plus the fee also applies to the shipping charge. I didn't include that. That is a major increase. I don't sell much there but now I may not use them at all. We'll see how this shakes out.

They may have killed the "Golden Goose".