Reverb Increasing Selling Fee

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not a huge increase, but still a bummer. between that and having to pay sales tax on used goods it definitely seems like selling locally, on forums, FB marketplace, etc. is the way to go.
 
I cancelled my Reverb account last month and my EBay account more than a year ago . I will use other selling and purchasing options like local online selling sites and drumforum.org .
 
I like Reverb, because you can support a bricks-and-mortar music store through them, if they don't have a website themselves. Guess I'll make it a point to go right to the music stores site, where possible.
 
Do they outline their plan to "significantly grow their marketplace"?
Or rather... Do they explain where the money is going to go?
 
Do they outline their plan to "significantly grow their marketplace"?
Or rather... Do they explain where the money is going to go?

full email:

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
 
I got out of buying/selling online once the states got wise to it and started shaking us down for online sales tax. I live about a mile and half from drumfactorydirect.com so if I need parts, heads, sticks etc, I'm good. If I see a big ticket item online I'll call the store and circumvent reverb or ebay.
 
If I can't sell it locally, I keep it.

Unless I'm getting an astronomical amount of money for gear, I simply won't sell online. There are too many fees and things that can go wrong.
 
I've been having a slow time selling things on Reverb lately regardless of a fee increase, and shipping across the country seems to have doubled in cost over the last ten years. I swear I used to be able to ship a piece of rack gear to California for 25-30 bucks and it's now 50.

Most of my sales lately have come from Facebook marketplace, or I'll just sell it to the drum shop, which helps support my favorite local business, not that it hurts that I teach there when a pandemic isn't happening.

Back to the original topic... Reverb was acquired by Etsy back in August of last year. A lot of folks I've seen moaning about the fee hike have been blaming Etsy for it, and it seems a bit disingenuous (to me) to justify a rate increase during an economic downturn by saying they're going to advertise more around the globe, when shipping is so expensive, and so slow. To go from 3.5% to 5% is to bring in 43% more revenue to the company. Seems like a pretty big jump if you ask me.

/wall
 
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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, and we will…

RAISE OUR FEES!

Thank you for your patronage.
 
@dwsabianguy -- Regarding Shipping. I have a DTX-532 that I was going to sell here in NY for ~$500. One of the members here in AZ expressed interest. I still have the two original boxes in my loft. Shipping was going to cost ~$250.

@cbphoto -- At least they outlined what they intended to do with the money in their e-mail.
 
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not a huge increase, but still a bummer. between that and having to pay sales tax on used goods it definitely seems like selling locally, on forums, FB marketplace, etc. is the way to go.


Not a huge increase? I would say a 43% increase is definitely huge (the increase is 1.5%, which is 43% of 3.5). I agree with dwsabianguy, this seems like a bad time to raise fees for overly corporate and focused group phrases like "global customer support team" and "sustain our community's continued growth". The email should have just said: "During these trying times where many musicians are out of work because they are unable to perform or teach and need to sell their gear just to put food on the table, we're going to take 43% more of your money than we did before! But don't worry, you'll get an "amazing" global customer support team! And we're doing this because "we care about you, the musicians", and this trying time when 95% of you are out of work. We "care about you, the musician" and we're helping "sustain the growth of our community" by taking 43% more of your money when you can least afford it. TRANSLATION: More musicians then ever before need to sell gear online in order just to make ends meet, so we're going to strike while the iron is hot and raise our fees. Think about how much more money we can make!!!!!!! We care about the musicians, because they are the ones paying us the fees so we can continue to make so much more money! Hey, how about we make 43% more than we did before and we'll just give them some BS about how great this wonderful opportunity to is to engage in furthering the development of the sustainability of the amazing global support that we provide? They are lucky we are doing this for them! We'll just say it in a very rosy, heavily corporate buzzword sounding email. They'll buy it word for word, they're only stupid musicians. Musicians that make us rich hahahahahahah!!!!!!!

Sorry Reverb, I see trough the BS. You don't care about anything but your own balance sheet and you're just as greedy as everyone else. If they did truly "care about us, the musicians" they wouldn't be raising their selling fees by 43% during a global pandemic when nearly all of their customers are not able to make income from their music.
 
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Not a huge increase? I would say a 43% increase is definitely huge (the increase is 1.5%, which is 43% of 3.5).

you're right. I didn't really think about it in those terms. I haven't really sold much on there over the years, so I basically looked at it like if I were to sell something for say $300, I'll get hit with a $15 fee (not including PayPal) instead of $10.50. $4.50 isn't entirely all that much in this scenario, but for higher volume sellers and bigger ticket items that will really add up.

I also imagine sellers will now adjust their prices accordingly though, which will make buying on there a touch more expensive.
 
you're right. I didn't really think about it in those terms. I haven't really sold much on there over the years, so I basically looked at it like if I were to sell something for say $300, I'll get hit with a $15 fee (not including PayPal) instead of $10.50. $4.50 isn't entirely all that much in this scenario, but for higher volume sellers and bigger ticket items that will really add up.

I also imagine sellers will now adjust their prices accordingly though, which will make buying on there a touch more expensive.


Right! Now they'll start the price on those 3 piece Pearl Exports at $1100 instead of $1000 :ROFLMAO:
 
With the anger of raising fees and all that (I even read an article where Guitar Center is heavily advertising right now to “buy your gear” at up to 80% off what you bought it for), the answer is simple: don’t sell anything.

If the music community really wants to stick it to these online entities, stop selling your stuff.
This doesn’t have anything to do with companies being greedy and not compassionate to the musicians, this is just them looking after their bottom line. They have costs to bear too. If I owned a bar that was forced close and still had to make ends meet, what do you think I’d do? The alternative is going out of business, right?

everything is screwed up right now so we all just need to roll with it. But really, you don’t need to complain. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. Keep the stuff you bought and enjoy it like the day you bought it.
 
With the anger of raising fees and all that (I even read an article where Guitar Center is heavily advertising right now to “buy your gear” at up to 80% off what you bought it for), the answer is simple: don’t sell anything.

If the music community really wants to stick it to these online entities, stop selling your stuff.
This doesn’t have anything to do with companies being greedy and not compassionate to the musicians, this is just them looking after their bottom line. They have costs to bear too. If I owned a bar that was forced close and still had to make ends meet, what do you think I’d do? The alternative is going out of business, right?

everything is screwed up right now so we all just need to roll with it. But really, you don’t need to complain. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. Keep the stuff you bought and enjoy it like the day you bought it.

Not picking on you, Bo. I just wanted to highlight something that my not be an option for a lot of musicians right now.

As a Financial Advisor of 20+ years now, I've been through three recessions and as each one has progressed, I've seen some clients and friends in the trades and in music either pawn or sell their tools/instruments. The longer the recession lasted, the more people did this and the lower the prices would go.

Right now in my and vyacheslav's area (Cincinnati, OH), there are some sound guys and musicians who are quietly (word of mouth) trying to sell gear to pay bills and make ends meet. I'm sure I'll see some of it on Craigslist and then eventually Reverb and/or ebay. And I'm certain this isn't unique to the Cincy region.

Specifically regarding Reverb raising their rates: Companies will be remembered for how they treat their employees and the public during hard times.
 
Not picking on you, Bo. I just wanted to highlight something that my not be an option for a lot of musicians right now.

As a Financial Advisor of 20+ years now, I've been through three recessions and as each one has progressed, I've seen some clients and friends in the trades and in music either pawn or sell their tools/instruments. The longer the recession lasted, the more people did this and the lower the prices would go.

Right now in my and vyacheslav's area (Cincinnati, OH), there are some sound guys and musicians who are quietly (word of mouth) trying to sell gear to pay bills and make ends meet. I'm sure I'll see some of it on Craigslist and then eventually Reverb and/or ebay. And I'm certain this isn't unique to the Cincy region.

Specifically regarding Reverb raising their rates: Companies will be remembered for how they treat their employees and the public during hard times.
I’m not being unkind about it. People are selling stuff everywhere to get by. I do not disagree that these are trying times. But, if Reverb changes its policy, what are you gonna do? Comply or complain?

You can also look at it like this: Reverb is seeing a spike in its activity and has to have more people on hand to handle the workload. Disney is in this mode about 100% of the time. When demand is high, ticket prices go up because traffic has to be controlled somehow. Years ago Knotts Berry farm let everybody in one day for a nickel. Imagine seeing this on the news and the near riot situation that happened outside that resort! It was amazing. Imagine your experience at Disneyland if we let in too many people - you’d hate it and still complain. Reverb and EBay are doing the same thing. They have to buy more bandwidth and have more IT dedicated technicians to handle the load and not let it screw up everybody else on the network, and I want a pleasant selling/shopping experience so I agree to the price increase.
 
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