Ebay Has Lost Their God-Damn Mind!
I used to sell on Ebay, but stopped selling on Ebay over a year ago because of the constant fee hikes that eBay imposes on it’s seller (like eBay doesn’t make enough money). Over the Halloween season, I decided to give eBay another shot and have come to this conclusion: EBAY IS A TOTAL JOKE. It’s not even close to being worth selling on eBay and you can tell that there has been a major decline in quality sellers, since nearly everything on eBay is total crap (shipping straight out of Taiwan) or overpriced (because the sellers have to pass on the cost of doing business on eBay to the buyers).
Say you bought a book for $5 and want to sell it for $10 (standard retail markup is 100%). If you sell that book on eBay for $10, it’s going to cost you $2.25 in fees, plus the $5 it cost for the product, so you profit a whooping $2.75 for a $10 eBay sale. Ebay is taking nearly HALF of your profit!
Say you have a $15 shirt that you want to sell for $30 on eBay. That will cost you $4.54 in fees, leaving you with profit of $10.46 on a $30 sale.
Ebay hides their fees by making them difficult to understand and by making them variable. You can check out the current eBay fees here:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html
But, don’t forget about the Paypal fees too (Paypal is owned by eBay):
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees
Also, eBay has decided that sellers can no longer participate in the feedback aspect of eBay. Sellers can not leave negative or neutral feedback for a buyer, no matter what. But buyers can leave negative or neutral feedback for a seller. Gee that seem fair?
Ebay is lame. I hope they go out of business soon. 
So true. Ebay was great, but corporate greed seems to have gotten hold of them. Nearly every recent ‘improvement’ seems to be a step backwards.
Bargains can still be had here and there (good for buyers), but for regular sellers it’s just not really worth the hassle.
In today’s shaky financial climate, when people would like to sell on things that they don’t really need, ebay could be making a killing, through helping people at the same time.
But unfortunately it seems they want to squeeze the people that helped make it so successful to begin with.
Are there any other auction sites that you would recommend, Summer?
I agree, ebay is now a rip off, it used to be good, but now i think it is only good for buyers
Bulbboy – I honestly don’t think there will ever be another “eBay” (including Ebay itself). You would need a HUGE marketing budget (well into the millions) to promote an ebay replacement in order to make it successful. Yahoo auctions couldn’t even pull it off and they offered free listings. There problem is that they had no buyers for the sellers. For used bargains, it’s all about Craigslist.org. For new stuff I like Google shopping:
http://www.google.com/products
James – I don’t even think eBay is good for buyers nowadays. All of the eBay fees are passed on to the buyer through jacked up shipping prices, or the cost of the item itself. Weather they know if or not.
I agree i’ve always hated buying from ebay, I recently sold on there and didn’t like all the listing prices, even if your stuff doesn’t sell. And paypall, don’t get me started. Paypall sucks. But did you here about the french lawsuit against ebay for selling all those knockoffs. Thats probably why they had to raise their fees.
Carrie – Yeah, Ebay is lame. We should invent something cooler
. The eBay fee hikes have been going on long before any lawsuit, so I highly doubt that has to do with it. It’s just simple greed. Ebay is SOOOO filthy rich (Ebay bought Paypal for $1.5 BILLION), but they want to be richer.
One or more egotisitcal rich ebay ‘execs’ somewhere got the mickey mouse idea that ebay should be all hyped-up with buzzwords and fancy-a$$ javascript that brings the entire site to a halt and won’t respond even on known-good celeron PCs w/ DSL/Cable. Freaking idiots.
E-bay is only good for buying.
Get what you win and your money back. How can you go wrong.