Overstock.com Auctions Revises Seller Subscription Plans

Overstock.com Auctions is eliminating its high-volume subscription plan for auction sellers. Overstock had rolled out the plans in March, allowing sellers to pay a flat monthly fee for listings, with a choice of ten plans. The top plan allowed sellers to list up to 7,500 items at a time for a monthly fee of $79.95.

Overstock.com announced on Saturday it was eliminating the top five subscription plans. The company said the subscription pricing caused sellers to lose incentive to offer lower starting prices. In the announcement to sellers, head of the auctions platform Stormy Simon wrote:

"While subscriptions with listings less than 300 have a sell-through rate of 7% or more, those over 300 sell-through at a drastically lower rate. As our percentage of closed auctions dropped, sadly, quite a few small merchants (often those with the highest sell-through rates) got lost in the mix and decided to leave us."

Current subscribers to the top five plans will find their plan expiring on or before December 31, and accounts will be credited for the unused portion. A schedule of the subscription plans can be found online (http://auctions.overstock.com/cgi-bin/auctions.cgi?PAGE=static&pagenum=17535).

Overstock.com management had come under fire recently for changes made to its Make It Mine feature and other site changes that were made during the current holiday shopping season (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m11/i28/s01). After an uproar about the decision to require sellers to price "Make It Mine" at two times the starting price of an auction, the company lowered the requirement to 1.5 times the starting price, effective December 7 (http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/viewtopic.php?t=16043). Overstock's Make It Mine is similar to eBay's Buy It Now feature.

In other news, Overstock.com issued a press release to report that its website had experienced heavy congestion intermittently between noon and 2:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on December 5 as holiday shoppers flooded the site to purchase the just-released "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" DVD at a special promotional price (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061205/latu114.html?.v=65). As a result, some customers were unable to access the site. Overstock was selling the DVD for $9.99 as part of its "12 Days of Christmas" campaign, which is still ongoing (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m12/i06/s02).

http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/viewtopic.php?t=16075