Don't know if posted, but just received from eBay.

[savedfrommyspokes]

Originally Posted by Brian Van Horn

•There will no longer be an allotment of free fixed price listings in these categories for sellers who don’t have an eBay Stores subscription.

This pretty much sums up what will happen with free listings....unless a seller is going to ante up at least $19.95/month, the free listings wont be available to them, but the large allotments of free listings will still be available to all store owners.

It seems that when ebay consistently started offering free listings to sellers several years back, they did so as a way to generate some incremental income to help improve the company's overall financial results. They obviously are seeing results from the free listings as they keep offering them as a way to comp their previous incremental sales that were generated by previous free listing offers. As ebay has shareholders to appease, they must continue to grow their business...since at this point their silver bullet seems to be these free listings, the free listings will continue(for store owners only now).

Until ebay can discover a new "silver bullet" to increase company revenue, the free listings will be their "silver bullet" of choice. There are multiple e-commerce websites available that for only a $200 monthly fee, you can list up to 100k items. Unless ebay remains competitive with these e-commerce sites(by offering free listings), they will continue to have sellers migrate to these non-ebay sites to sell their products.