I remember a few years ago selling my first item on eBay. It was a Jornada 680e and it was a very smooth experience. Since that time I have sold a lot of stuff on eBay, but over the last few months and years I’ve been very disappointed in eBay and the experience it now offers.

For starters there’s the dodgy sellers selling items with silly low prices, but outrageously inflated postage costs to sidestep the fees associated with selling. As a seller, I have never done that since it’s against the rules, but the enforcement of the policy seems to be very lax, and it’s simply unfair to those of us playing by the rules.

I can somewhat understand why sellers do this: eBay’s fees are out of control. They realise they have a hold on the market, and therefore continue to put up the costs of listing. Not only that, they introduced a new policy a few months ago requiring all auctions to offer PayPal as an option for payment. That really put me off. I’ve had poor experiences with PayPal before, as has Judie, and for it to be forced on us sellers because eBay claim it’s a safer way to pay is outrageous. I’ve bought stuff on PayPal that was faulty, seller would not do anything about it. PayPal took a ridiculously long time to reject the claim with no reasoning given.

Even worse than forcing you to accept payments through PayPal, which costs the seller a percentage of the total, eBay owns PayPal. How convenient for them, they charge you a fee on eBay to list your item, then a final value fee if it sells, then you can add yet another tax from PayPal for receiving a payment, then you get slugged a transaction fee if you withdraw less than $150 from your account.

Let’s say I listed and sold an item on eBay for AU$60 (with free postage) and the buyer decided to pay with PayPal. For extra exposure I added a Buy It Now option and a picture next to my listing title. I worked out the figures and this is what I ended up with:

eBay Fees:

• Insertion fee – AU$1.50
• Buy It Now – AU$0.10
• Gallery – AU$0.59
• Final Fee (5.25% on items under AU$75) – AU$3.15

Total: AU$5.34

PayPal Fees:

• 2.4% PayPal transaction fee – AU$1.44
• PayPal fixed fee – AU$0.30

Total: AU$1.74

Grand Total: AU$7.08

On my sale of A$60 eBay skimmed almost 12%, which is quite a lot in my book. Obviously not in eBay’s, since they have come up with yet another way to make money of your listings: Advertisements.

The fees weren’t enough to keep eBay happy, now they have started to place “Sponsored Advertisements” in the auctions that sellers are paying for. This reminds me a lot of those Post-It Note advertisements you see on the front of newspapers occasionally, stacking one advertisement on top of another without much regard for the ad beneath. According to eBay’s quiet announcement of this addition, it’s to “complement the category and sellers’ listings”. I’m sorry, but that’s absolute crap. Why on earth would I want someone straying off to look at someone elses advert before they have even read my own?

A good example of this complimentary advertising showed up on an auction for some lights for my car. Above the sellers description for their item was an advertisement for Pay TV services. Wow, thanks eBay! I’m so glad you brought up Pay TV since that would go very well with a new set of taillights for my car.

Maybe this is just me, and if so feel free to disregard the above, but I’m tired of eBay increasing their fees and putting unfair restrictions on users, not to mention the added bonus of ads appearing on my ads, just because they are the major player in the market. A competitor really needs to snap to and bring on the competition.

No related posts.