Chrono24 is getting too greedy

There are a lot of ways to sell watches, each with their own pros and cons. They range from selling privately through forums to selling professionally through one's own websites and through marketplaces such as eBay or Chrono24.

 The biggest watch marketplace by far is with some 1.5 million offerings at any time. eBay is a mixed blessing for sure, with lots of highly questionable offerings and pitfalls at every turn for the uniformed buyer. When saying you bought a watch on eBay, your conversation partner immediately expects there is something wrong with the watch. 

To counter this sentiment, eBay has in the last couple of years started offering certified watches. This service has its own flaws but seems to have helped somewhat on the quality offered through it.

"If you say you bought a watch on eBay everyone expects there's something wrong with it"

 is a dedicated marketplace for watches and emphasizes that it's a market for luxury watches, thus not all the broken, defect or scrap watches that are a big part of eBay. It's the largest dedicated watch marketplace with about 0.5 million watches on offer. Chrono24 has an authenticity guarantee for all watches sold and gives its sellers various badges and seals of trust as the sellers perform successful transactions. Chrono24 also uses an escrow service, through which the buyer has a bulletproof protection against dishonest sellers, only paying the seller the purchase amount 14 days after the buyer received the watch and has had time to check it if necessary. For the buyer of a watch there is in my view no comparison between eBay and Chrono24; the buyer is always safe on Chrono24, less so on eBay.

One of the biggest differences between selling on eBay and Chrono24 apart from the different market positioning used to be that eBay charged much higher selling fees. eBay and Chrono24 have similar fee structures, with a fee for placing an ad and a separate fee for the actual sale. Unless you sell more than 250 watches per month, the ad placement fee is 0 on eBay. However, the sales fee was always quite high on eBay and is currently at 15% for sales below $5000 and 9% above $5000. 

"Chrono24 has increased their seller fees by about 300% over the last six years"

I started selling watches on Chrono24 while I was still living in the Netherlands, back in 2017. At that time, Chrono24 charged a flat 3% fee for each sale and a fee for an allotted number of listings. When I first started selling on Chrono24 the fee for 25 listings was from my recollection about €150 euros per month. This fee is fixed regardless of how many actual active listings you have. 

As of May 2024 the sales fee I experience for most of my sales is about 9%. I now have 150 allotted listings, which costs €1049 per month. My average listing price is just over €1500. Some watches sell immediately after they are listed while others may take a year or more to sell. The average turnaround for a watch is about four months. That means that on average each watch has a placement fee of about 2%. Thus in total the fee is now some 11% on Chrono24 and it has been ticking upwards pretty much every month for the last years. 

Chrono24 is still the best place for me to sell watches apart from through my own website, but it seems they took on a whole new level of greed after going public, which is sadly how capitalism too often works. The investors demand a return for their money and the only way to get that is to squeeze the customers. If the managers of the company are not strong enough they resort to screwing over their customers just to satisfy their investors. It's the same story that made most watch brands going from making the best watches they could to making the best watches they can at the lowest production cost while simultaneously building in failure expectancies in order to replace spare parts at a premium every few years. 

Chrono24's prices have increased by about 300% in six years. A breaking point is soon approaching if this trend continues unabated. Sellers are not moneybags that can be squeezed ever harder, we are also stakeholders in Chrono24. It is time Chrono24 leadership starts acting in the best interest of all their stakeholders and not only their shareholders. Enough already.