The eBay robbery

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 they are 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 brake even or to make just 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 of 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!

79 Comments

  1. Clean blog. Thinking if you ever trade guest content pieces? I am running a site on top of my on the road to obsession water filters plus browsing on the road to trade several reports with impressive websites. I checked out your webpage in addition to you’ve got a number of major writing with I feel our site visitors would both find value. Gratitude!

  2. Definitely agree with what you stated. Your explanation was certainly the easiest on the way to understand. I tell you, I usually get irked when folks discuss issues that they plainly do not recognize about. You managed in the direction of hit the nail right on top of the head and explained out everything without complication. Maybe, people can take a signal. Will likely be back on the way to get more. Gratitude

    1. Oh I am sure the value bounces back if you do it smart. what I don’t like is the high fees. For an example. What difference does it make if I start an auction at £0.99 or £50? Why should there be more charge for it? Or else an extra digit takes up so much more real estate?

  3. Fed up with obtaining low amounts of useless traffic to your website? Well i want to tell you about a fresh underground tactic that produces me personally $900 every day on 100% AUTOPILOT. I really could be here all day and going into detail but why dont you just check their website out? There is really a excellent video that explains everything. So if your seriously interested in making quick cash this is the website for you. Auto Traffic Avalanche

  4. I figured out it might be an longstanding commentary, anyhow I feel that I have got to say thank you because of suchlike piece of advice you hand over me.
    I’ve being attend to 100% the same ideas.
    I saved this written work on top of all my shared network in whatever place I hold bookmarkings.

    With honest sympathy,
    Margot
    PS: Wake up! It’s more than easy to succeed with money. No more than Google search. Or else begin right under your very nose.

    1. I amnot saying Ebay is not a good place to shop. i am saying it’s a robbery what they do. Charging increasing amounts for higher listing prices for an example. What for??? Charging 10 percent final value fee on average??? Isn’t that a lot? Charging an additional 4 percent on paypal transaction. Shouldn’t that be part of the service and included in the astronomical 10 percent charge? The food stores don’t have a ten percent margin.
      Yeah Ebay is alright if you are looking for something, but the selection has dipped dramatically in the past couple of years as teh prices increased. I sure don’t list as many items as I used to and that’s due to the high fees. I list in classifieds and on other auction sites that have lesser fees.

  5. Why have you removed my comment? It is in fact helpful unlike the vast majority of comments posted here… I will post it again please don’t get rid of it as many people will it quite beneficial. Hey guys i want to show you about this great system i have been using during the last two months called Auto Blog System X. This is probably mainly for the website administrator and everyone else intrested in making money or starting to publish blogs. I personally made just over $3000 because of this during my first month. It basically is a system that generates blogs for you 100% automatically that gets you a huge amount of visitors to your site from google and other search engines. Do not take my word for it… Check their website out and i guarantee they are going to hook you in. Its just amazing 🙂 Make Money Blogging – Auto Blog System X

Leave a Reply