“A day late and a dollar short”. That has been my standard operating procedure for this past month. This issue is a bit late. Sorry about that. As usual I was juggling too many balls and this is one got dropped. I hate to have to publish this July issue in August, so I therefore declare today is July 32nd! I still have a few more articles and features from our writers to post on the site so please check back at the “latest articles” link on the site to see those in a day or so. https://www.notsomoderndrummer.com/#/test-latest-articles
Reverb.com increases selling fee to 5%
So, I just received an email notice from Reverb.com about their selling fee increase from 3.5% to 5% on August 4, 2020. If you weren’t aware of it, Reverb was sold to Etsy for 275 million a year ago. Etsy is a huge site for selling handmade and vintage craft items. Millions of items, millions of sellers and buyers, and millions of dollars in profits. Guess what Etsy’s selling fee has been all along? – you guessed it – 5%.
Just a quick caveat here about Not So Modern Drummer’s marketplace site, DrumSellers.com. Our selling fee is 4% and will not be raised anytime soon, if ever. It might actually go down. There are no other fees, period, When I first started DrumSellers I was planning on matching Reverb’s selling fee of 3.5% but the turnkey site I use would only allow for whole numbers for the commission percentage so I went with 4%. No one has ever complained about that commission percentage: ”4%? Man, that’s nothin’” is the usual comment. There is a point at the end of this little rant that I hope will benefit all you drummers out there, so please hear me out.
A great colleague of mine had already been through the process of selling his thirty year old successful drum related business to a conglomerate and watched them drive it into extinction within three years. He emailed me last year about Etsy acquiring Reverb. He wrote ‘this may be your opportunity’. He wrote me the same thing this week about Reverb’s fee hike. We have had long conversations about second generation corporate ownership – about how, during the initial transition period of a year or two, the staff, management and mission stays the same and operates independently, but is soon followed by what they call “growth”: new managers, new staff, more integration into the parent company, new “mission”. The new mission usually being “let’s make this bigger” and “add more diverse products” etc. Reverb had already added vinyl albums, which was not much of a stretch, but I foresee Reverb expanding into other areas of “music and entertainment products and services” which is how I think the parent company views Reverb’s customer base.
EBAY had already become so bloated years ago, with numerous and excessive fees, penalties, rules, restrictions, and owning Paypal since 2002. They basically became a financing bank with a bunch of merchandise in the window: other people’s merchandise. They have never had the sellers’ backs – always siding with the buyers in any disagreement or claim.
I think Reverb is headed in the same direction. They already have their own bank/payment system; Reverb Bucks (kind of says it all, doesn’t it?), and a pay by the click “Bump” system. They will probably add more of Etsy’s fees; listing fee of 20 cents per item, shipping labels which they make a percentage of, and fees received from other third party payment systems. Basically, second generation ownership, and especially corporate ownership, almost always tries to grow their customer base by adding unrelated products, fees and services which drives away a big percentage of their original customer base who were there for the simple focus and niche that attracted them in the first place. The DrumSellers mission is to add more drums and drummers; not more clutter but more clarity.
Now, I am not bitching and moaning about Reverb. More power to them. They took a huge bite out of Ebay and started with very low fees. Reverb was my role model for DrumSellers. Their rate hike is actually working in DrumSeller’s favor. It is creating more of an opportunity for me and the drummers that I serve to attract more buyers and sellers who abandon Reverb for our simpler niche venue. There are already sellers who quit selling on Reverb and Ebay and moved their listings to DrumSellers.com in these first two years. I think the general feeling is that drummers want to go to a drum shop where there is nothing but drum gear, not Guitar Center with all the noisy other instruments and DJ stuff. :-) We (that’s the royal we…ME!) are working in the opposite direction: niching further instead of expanding, keeping the site ridiculously simple and focused, NOT increasing fees and services for profit, not changing the look of the site every six months, keeping the trust of buyers and sellers, and not adding products that fall outside the purview of D>R>U>M>S, but adding more drums and more drummers.
I do have some improvements planned for DrumSellers site but, as you can imagine, the pandemic has halted funds for that temporarily. Some of the improvements are a more structured membership and vetting system, an image enlarger, adding images to the email system, a shipping calculator (no fee for that), multiple membership tiers, extra discounts for quantity and commercial sellers – all improvements that have been asked for by the members. And I plan on doing advertising and promotion outside of Not So Modern Drummer and its associated social media.
The point, that I mentioned earlier, is that I treat DrumSellers as a “club” and those who sign up are members of that club. I vet them personally and respond personally to any questions or problems. I hope it grows to where I can’t handle that by myself at some point. I listen to any suggestions or criticisms and react. I am considering two things that might benefit you as a member. I’m considering dropping the commission to 3% for active users, temporarily but possibly permanently. I’m also considering starting a completely separate similar site for sales of guitars and basses, because so many of us drummers play those instruments. Not an expansion of DrumSellers, but a completely different flea market. There would be a very rigid “wall of separation between church and state”: The guitar site would not be mixed with the drum site other than a small link on each site. I would like to know your thoughts on these two ideas because I value your opinions and I can’t do this alone. Thanks and remember to put a mask on your drums and sanitize them. :-)