LeftyBassist.com

... because taking more of your money is going to “help you grow your sales”... yeah ok, right.


To Our Community,

I’m writing to share upcoming changes that will enable us to significantly grow our marketplace so that we can help our sellers 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

What a nice little spinny spin. They do it all for us.

I knew it was just a matter of time. Every corporation suffers from "Onceler Syndrome" eventually. Perhaps if they had said they had taken a financial hit due to COVID-19, I might understand, but to say the opposite and that you're now the largest online marketplace with largest growth, best sales ever, yada, yada, it just screams of greed. The distinction between Reverb and Ebay has grayed even further now, and we all know how dead Ebay became after their incessant increases and hidden fees.

Compound this with the crazy increase in shipping rates of recent years (I remember when I could ship a bass for under $25 a few years ago), and you really can't make any $ selling anymore.

Reverb likely didn't take much of a hit because of Covid, although the hit might be creeping in now. My shops Reverb sales went up astronomically in the months of March, April, and May and we sustained sales growth still through June and most of July.
I will say though, I am certain that some of that increase does go well towards what Reverb spends on Adwords and Google display network remarketing

But I also suspect this has a lot to do with them being purchased by Etsy last year, and their new ownership saw space to make more money from their overall traffic increase.