Money Blog

I am sure many eBay sellers are not aware of how much money eBay charge for an item sold. Here is my example.

I am very very p****d off at eBay.  Why? Because they do nothing but rob sellers off of their money. I just sold some stuff for a total of around £500 pounds and guess what? Their fee was £98 pounds and some change. 20 percent before pay-pal fees of another 3.44 percent or so. for a GRAND TOTAL OF close to 25% fee. and if I add the listing fee to this. it might reach 25%.

For what? Selling a few pieces of something. Millions are using ebay and get scammed by an image of easy money just to have a large chunks of their money taken. Ebay charge different amounts of money for different listing prices. Say you list an item for 0.99 there is no charge. List that same item for 1 and there is a 0.15 charge. List that same for 10 and there will a charge of around 0.40 and so on. List that same item for 200 and there will be a charge of somewhere around 4. -The numbers represent money-

Plus the selling fee, (they call a final value fee), plus the paypal fee, because pay-pal also owned by eBay.

I would advise anyone who is trying to use ebay to make money with, think it through very very careful or else they are going to lose money instead of making some. Unless of course just selling off old stuff and don’t care about profit.

But because most people who sell on ebay are doing it for profit, they have to look at the completed sales prices, for selling price comparison, to learn how much they can  expect to sell their stuff for and calculate their cost. They have to look at the cost of the item they sell, plus 25% of the expected selling price, for the fees, add those two together and that is their cost, before they realize any profit.

If you had bought something for £80 and sold it for £100 you had actually lost money on the deal by selling it on eBay. Not much just a few percentage points but it is a loss after all and you thought you just made a good deal. So this item would have to be sold for close to 105 in order to make a tiny profit. Bad deal, because it might not reach the desired amount and if you put a reserve price on it that cost extra money too!

Some of my friends are buying and selling on ebay and they only make a very risky and very thin profit margin on those items. If the item didn’t sell and you re-list the item you have to take the second listing fee into consideration too as many items that didn’t sell are not eligible for re-listing for the same listing fee.  Multiply this rip-off by the millions of sellers and you can see the magnitude of it.

Regardless of this rip-off, eBay is easy to use and had became a comparison site when someone buys used stuff anywhere in the western world. They go to eBay and compare the used stuff”s price with that of how much they sell on eBay for.

There are alternative sites that don’t charge these exorbitant fees. Online classifieds, other auction sites, free classifieds, or even flea-markets (car boot sales). Selling cars on eBay is quite expensive and you are better off of advertising it on Auto-trader or some other online auction,  or classifieds sites. Save yourself close to a hundred pounds.

Many sellers at flea-markets buy from each other and sell it at their own table for a higher price if they happened to buy it at the low price. People do this on ebay too but they are taking a risk of losing money.

Me and my wife are selling most of our stuff on other auction sites and not on eBay, because they don’t rip you off off all your profit. We buy and sell on the Internet and on flea-markets (car boot sales) and we avoid eBay as much as we can. We can get away with  paying below 10 percent on other auction sites and some of them cost even less.

I know there is a price to pay for everything but I think ebay’s fees are exorbitant!

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