I used to gripe quite a bit about ebay fees here. Several years ago I was making very good money selling new CD's on ebay. Back then the listing fee was about .20 per disc and when one would sell I would get charged about a 3% fee on the final sale price. Then of course you'd have to give PayPal about 3% of the total for accepting payment.
I got out of selling on ebay after about three straight years of fee increases which combined with postage increases and distributor increases made it impossible to turn a profit (all those expenses kept going up but the price of a CD never really did).
Anyway, today I checked out ebay again. They've dropped their listing fee to .15 now. It had gotten as high as .40 when I quit. But their final value fee for CD's is now up to 15%!!!!! That's INSANE!
I have no idea what PayPal has gone up to, but I'm sure it's a lot higher now too.
Yeesh. I guess I won't get back into selling small items on ebay.
My sister used to have an ebay store selling mostly clothes and jewelry. She got out of it for the same reason. We were going to try to sell additional merchandise, but it was almost impossible to make money.
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MM
That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable.
So why hasn't a reasonable alternative come along?
When ebay started it was like an online rummage sale. I wish another site or two would come along with the advertising muscle to do that again.
I don't mind paying fees for my sales, I understand that the company has to make money too. But when you're getting into 20 - 30% of your GROSS sale price going to the site (combination of Ebay & PayPal) it's getting a little out of control.
Yahoo... How I WISH I had been smarter... back when I was in college, I had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor. They were looking for investers and had targeted people going to the school I went to since we were "techy". I vividly remember talking it over with my friends and we all decided that NOBODY would take a company called Yahoo seriously. None of us invested... BIG HUGE MISS!!
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MM
That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable.
