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Reverb increasing seller fees

#101
Reverb has a lot of polished videos and well written articles that probably adds to their operational costs. I do like those articles and videos. The shipping is crazy high and I wished they regulate that. A package at less than 25 lbs from Socal to NM cost me 79. I do find good deals and free shipping from the MIDI store and Perfect Circuit when I was building up my synth and modest small Eurorack setup. The MIDI store operates out of Sedona AZ and Perfect Circuit is an actual store in Burbank. Both are good sellers. I do not know about bass gear though. Except for consumables (strings etc) bass and guitar related, I have refrained from buying on line. The hybrid bass/guitar was recommended to me by Clay and Wes Lambe from one of their customers and it was more of a private sale.

TB is a good resource for most use gear. I got burned only once
 
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#102
bdplaid said:
Being a good capitalist, I appreciate profit. However, Reverb and the like are simply middlemen, adding to the cost and diminishing the profit. IMO that middle cost has gotten prohibitive, especially for the little schmucks like us just trying to move one bass to make room for another. But then, that's what TB and Craigslist are for, guys like us.

As for world-wide access to customers, that's a red herring. When the hell am I going to sell a bass to someone overseas? No one can afford the shipping.


Doing deals here on TB I learned a couple of ways to get around some fees, and I was happy to do it.

If one looks at the profit sheets on outfits like eBay, PayPal, Etsy and others, they ain't hurting. I think this is gouging.

And to those who think a $50 fee is reasonable just for using the website, I think that's a lot when it all gets added up. They nickel and dime us to death. The work they do for a sale of $10 to $10K is the same, so why not just a flat fee? No, that wouldn't generate enough.

On a personal note, I got hosed by GroupOn, and PayPal was the antithesis of helpful when it came to resolving it. I got better service from my bank card issuer, whom I use directly for payments now. Again, cut out the middleman's cost, and all the prices go down. I no longer use PayPal.

Like PayPal, I'm in the process of getting rid of Amazon, but they more or less ran a lot of companies out of business, so the options for buying things are fewer. And the Chinese junk on there, oy. Yet sometimes I just have to deal with the devil. But as little as possible.

But back to reverb, it was proven long ago that cutting out middlemen reduced the price for the consumer.
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I apologize for my above response, I just got off work and got hot under the collar when I should have just eaten a snack. I agree that shipping internationally is cost prohibitive and that this is gouging
 
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#103
BunchyMutt said:
haha but those millions don't really hit their bottom line. I don't see it as "political," as you said in a previous post. It's financial. Reverb is signaling to folks that they're on board (for now) while simultaneously investing in communities and artists who's artistic products have historically worked their way into the main stream for the last two hundred years. But feel free to keep belaboring your point, there are a slew of effect makers that I guess you'll also not support if you have the decency to at least be consistent. You can have Fulltone, a bunch of us can have everything else.
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Not sure where you are coming from with this "belaboring" idea. I get your comment about Fulltone, and I neither mentioned Fuller nor defend him. I don't use his products either. But if i did, I might. And that's my point: THE ONLY THING I WANT TO BE CONCERNED WITH IS HOW GOOD THE THING SOUNDS AND OPERATES AND ENHANCES MY MUSIC, NOTHING ELSE. Politics ruins every damned thing.

I simply want to be in control of where my donation dollars go (and I donate A LOT every year). I simply don't want to pay inflated prices so something in which I have either no interest or may be flat-out against, gets supported. My money, my choice, right? Apparently not.
 
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#105
bdplaid said:
Not sure where you are coming from with this "belaboring" idea. I get your comment about Fulltone, and I neither mentioned Fuller nor defend him. I don't use his products either. But if i did, I might. And that's my point: THE ONLY THING I WANT TO BE CONCERNED WITH IS HOW GOOD THE THING SOUNDS AND OPERATES AND ENHANCES MY MUSIC, NOTHING ELSE. Politics ruins every damned thing.

I simply want to be in control of where my donation dollars go (and I donate A LOT every year). I simply don't want to pay inflated prices so something in which I have either no interest or may be flat-out against, gets supported. My money, my choice, right? Apparently not.
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I agree that it's your choice. I guess I disagree that Reverb/Etsy is doing all this to recoup 'losses', which you even stated above that they are among companies that are doing pretty well for themselves. I see it as financial, although I say that as someone who things everything, and I literally mean everything, is political at some level :help:
 
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#106
Rip Van Dan said:
I believe, at this point in their development, that they have to be careful not to price themselves our of this market
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I think they’re definitely planning on pricing themselves out of the market for individuals who occasionally sell a piece of their own personal gear along with many of the part time flippers who basically do it as a side hustle for extra cash.

I think their real goal is to transition over to a shopping mall type model like Amazon has. Which means its business would be providing a central point of sales for manufacturers, retailers, boutique builders and the like.

If that’s the case, then getting rid of casual private sellers is definitely going to be a priority for Reverb. But kicking people out looks bad. So the easiest way to get rid of the clients and business you no longer want is to price yourself out of the market for them by upping your rates.

In the businesses world that’s called culling and cherry picking your clients. ;)
 
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#107
40Hz said:
I think they’re definitely planning on pricing themselves out of the market for individual sellers who occasionally sell a piece of their own personal gear and many of the part time flippers who basically do it as a side hustle for extra cash.

I think their real goal is to transition over to a shopping mall type model like Amazon has. Which means it’s business would be providing a central point of sales for manufacturers, retailers, boutique builders and the like.

If that’s the case, then getting rid of casual private sellers is definitely going to be a priority for Reverb. But kicking people out looks bad. So the easiest way to get rid of the clients and business you no longer want is to price yourself out of the market for them.

In the businesses world that’s called culling and cherry picking your clients. ;)
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+1
 
#112
Reverb, in a time of economic crisis that has gravely impacted the arts community more than most, and driven many to desperately sell gear to meet subsistence needs, has decided now is an appropriate time to raise their fees by 42.8%, in one fell swoop.

0B352492-20C1-40EB-A4FE-4820EADFA63B.jpeg


To Our Community,


I’m writing to share upcoming changes that will enable us to significantly grow our marketplace so that we can help you reach even more buyers all over the world. Beginning on August 4, 2020, we are increasing our selling fee for the first time ever⁠— from 3.5 % to 5%.


When Reverb launched in 2013, the idea was simple—an online marketplace built specifically for the musical instrument community by a team of musicians. Our team thought about everything that we, as music makers, wanted in a site for selling gear and put it into Reverb: A live support team staffed with musicians, tailored tools to make things like price negotiation easier, a personalizable feed and useful content to help buyers find exactly what they want, and more.


Today, Reverb is the largest online marketplace dedicated to buying and selling musical instruments. In the past year alone, our community has achieved tremendous growth. More consumers are buying instruments than ever before, and players of all levels increasingly are buying gear online. As more buyers move online, we’ve heard you loud and clear: You want more support and more tools to help you get your gear in front of Reverb’s expanding audience of high-quality buyers and grow your sales.


We take the role that we play in supporting your business very seriously. Over the past seven years, our team has worked tirelessly to improve our marketplace to support your business and to find new ways to help you grow your sales. Now is the time to deepen our commitment to these efforts. We are modifying our selling fee to help us invest more to sustain our community’s continued growth. This year alone, we plan to increase our investment from 2019 by:

  • Investing over 30% more in marketing initiatives—including SEO, online video advertising, and other digital advertising—to get your inventory in front of more buyers from around the world.
  • Expanding by more than 25% the capacity of our global customer support team focused on assisting you and your buyers as we grow.
  • Increasing by more than 40% the capacity of our product team focused on creating and enhancing seller tools and services to increase the visibility of your shop and inventory.
Our team comes to work each day to ensure the success of our sellers—our marketplace simply doesn’t exist without the independent shops, makers, artists, experts, and individuals that form our vibrant seller community. These changes will enable us to bring more buyers to Reverb on your behalf, support the long-term health of your online business, and continue growing together.




Sincerely,

David Mandelbrot

CEO, Reverb
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#114
Well, I guess Reverb finally realized it's a website full of over priced crap. ... And since, no ones buying, they're upping their cut. ... Every time I go on it, it looks like a gear graveyard. ... I miss pawn shops so much. ... When what you paid is what it was worth. ... Not, what some idiot, living in their parents basement, claims it's worth. ...
 
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#115
bdplaid said:
Being a good capitalist, I appreciate profit. However, Reverb and the like are simply middlemen, adding to the cost and diminishing the profit. IMO that middle cost has gotten prohibitive, especially for the little schmucks like us just trying to move one bass to make room for another. But then, that's what TB and Craigslist are for, guys like us.

...

But back to reverb, it was proven long ago that cutting out middlemen reduced the price for the consumer.
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The direct price, maybe. But Reverb, as a "market-maker" aka "middleman", adds significant value to the process:
  • Wider audience. You disparage this advantage as unnecessary, but the sales I've made on that site, every one of them, have been out of state, to people I wouldn't know from Adam. More eyes on a listing sells the item faster and for closer to its asking price by increasing demand, so you get more of the money you had tied up in this item faster.
  • Economies of scale in logistics. I'm not sure you've ever had the pleasure, but walking into a UPS Store with a 50-pound and/or 4-foot-long package bound halfway across the country is going to cost you hundreds of dollars. Shipping on both amplifiers I've bought on Reverb were less than $50, and not because the seller was "eating" that cost. The basses I sold shipped for less than $25 each (one of those cost $150 to ship to me from the family member I bought it from). That's because Reverb generates enough business for all three major US package handlers that they can play them against each other for deep discounts on large-package rates, just like Amazon does. If you're selling pedals and strings you probably won't notice because those rates are already bare-bones, but if you're selling axes and amps you definitely will.
  • Payment processing. You lampoon PayPal, but the plain and simple truth is without them, or similar companies that have moved into the online payment processing arena, you would be handling the payment information yourself. That's liability half a dozen ways; not only can you be scammed with counterfeit checks or money orders, you can be sued for identity theft if it can be cogently argued that your handling of someone else's payment card information to handle a payment led in any way to that account being charged up or cleaned out.
  • Limited liability. When I sell on Reverb, I am a sole proprietor, DBA my online persona. My personal name and address are on the return label of any package I send. I have no LLC or S-Corp registration of my own through which I can act, and I sell with no contract. Were I not selling through Reverb, my liability relating to that sale is theoretically unlimited. I sold a bass that broke during its first gig? I can be held liable in a court on the other side of the country not only for all costs paid by the buyer when he bought it and costs to repair or replace it, but the money he can prove he has or will definitely lose for lack of that instrument. And if it broke in a way that injured him, especially visibly and/or permanently? Good-bye house. Except I sold through Reverb, whose click-wrap TOS binds me as the seller to list my item with an honest description, and assuming I did so, the buyer's options against me are limited. At worst, he can still enforce a chargeback for the item (ouch, yes, but I'm not paying to defend my actions in the sale in a court halfway across the US, nor writing the buyer a blank check for any damages he can document).
That's all just the services provided to me by listing the damn thing on their site. I haven't touched on the tools Reverb provides as a matter of course to both buyer and seller, including price history and analytics, product reviews, watchlists and feeds of interesting items, etc. These are offered totally free to the user, and they cost money, so someone's gotta pay the piper.

And after all that, they want 5% to list, 2.9% to handle the payment, and whatever more you agree to pay to get your product to the top of someone's search (totally your option). You can't sell real estate in my local market and not pay 8% to get out of the house. If you're not willing to cover buyer's agent and closing, buyers have plenty of other houses to look at. Meanwhile I've also sold on consignment before; not only do consignment stores insist on 20%, they also control the price, which they reduce over time because they need to move the thing to make room for someone else's item, and if you come back and get it before it sells you pay "rent" to the consigner.

On Reverb, you set the price, they will serve up your listing including several MB of images on their servers indefinitely until it sells or you take it down, and if it doesn't sell, you don't pay them for their sunk costs. If you don't understand how utterly different this model is from any other "middleman" you would have had the option to use prior to the Internet, you should probably familiarize yourself with how consignment, pawn and secondhand stores typically work. The long and short of it is you don't know, or have forgotten, what "getting f***ed by a middleman" really means.
 
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#116
BunchyMutt said:
  • Thoughts?
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We...(all of us) are the market. As sellers and buyers we need platforms. And we need people, systems and processes to manage those platforms safely and with some sense of balance. I am personally happy to be able to find anything I need in the safe comfort of my studio chair and have it delivered with little effort on my part. In 20 years of steady, consistent online gear buying, selling and trading I still greatly appreciate Ebay, Reverb, Craigslist, Forums, Paypal, Venmo, UPS, FED-EX, USPS... they are still steady operating platforms that allows the system itself to exist. Speaking strictly for myself and not to anything already mentioned, I carry no sense of entitlement that these companies owe me anything. I know the cost of doing business going in and am grateful for the market being there at all.
 
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#117
Bob Clayton said:
I get that it sucks for sellers, but I really don’t think it’s that much of an increase. If you got a 1.5% raise at work, I don’t think you’d consider that a big raise.

It’s an extra $15 for a $1000 sale. Still cheaper than ebay.
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It's true that a 1.5% pay increase isn't much, but I'm afraid that your math is faulty in this case. (1.5% / 3.5%) X 100 = 43%. In one go, Reverb increased their take by 43%, not by 1.5%. That would make for a pretty good raise for many people.
 
#120
I am surprised they took this long. Businesses need to show growth for markets (private and public) to ascribe any real value to them and they can only sell so many pieces of gear each year once they reach saturation as a platform. So it is inevitable that they raise rates. But if you think about it this is a 43% increase. There is no way that they are going to increase their "market initiatives" in lockstep with the uptick they will see in revenue. I doubt you will see any difference in the quality or speed/ease of sales. This is just BS corporate communications and Etsy wanting to maximize their return. And when the alternative is ebay, they have room to raise rates even more.
 

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