Ebay Fees - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 01, 2013, 11:36:06 pm
content: Ebay Oz have just upped their final value fee to 9.9%:http://sellercentre.ebay.com.au/fs5Not including the 2.4% PayPal fee as well.Makes selling your gear on ebay very unattractive. But then again, it's been that way for a long time now.

author: Radio Tech
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2013, 11:37:47 pm
content: That is why I quit some time back. They want all the profit.

author: ddavidebor
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2013, 11:39:49 pm
content: Yeah i see it everiday... It's pretty expensive...

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 12:31:01 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 01, 2013, 11:36:06 pmAlmost makes NZ'swww.trademe.co.nzfees seem reasonable, almost. 7.9% selling fee (excluding postage) - a 50c minimum selling fee though. Paypal not popular here but trademe can accept creditcard on the sellers behalf, fee of 1.9% (including postage). No listing fees for basic listings.Australians can sell on trademe.co.nz too (but nobody else), as long as you have an NZ bank account. International shipping AU to/from NZ isn't TOO expensive.I thought that Australia had a home-grown auctions site too, gumtree?

author: 6502Dude
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 12:34:14 am
content: These fees are not reasonable!With E(vil)-Bay fee continued fee increases, this presents a new opportunity for new (lower cost) entrants into online buy/sell market.Most of non US clients have been screwed on currency exchange rates for years by Pay(not your)Pal.Perhaps this is finally the time for change in this business model.

author: mikgntl-2013
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 12:34:55 am
content: 3.4% for paypal transactions here in Italy.And if you sell on ebay.com they also retain your funds for 21 days.I sold a few items in the last month - prompt shipment, quick delivery and positive feedbacks received, but my funds are still blocked after 10 days.What a fantastic place to sell your stuff! Don't you think so?

author: Wartex
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 12:38:52 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 01, 2013, 11:36:06 pmRemember when Myspace was a monster hosted in massive datacenters with millions of users? Facebook killed it. It's a natural life cycle and the only reason they are even alive is popularity of PayPal and old fame. I can't wait for them to die.

author: staxquad
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 02:15:17 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 01, 2013, 11:36:06 pmI just tried their estimator for my region, new rates will be 12% for a $100 item. They are getting up there in the stratosphere of parasites like banksters. 12% of every single transaction on Ebay is a hell of a lot of money for holding a few bites of data for each transaction. And their overhead must be lowering when participation increases, and they still raise rates, I guess to whatever level the market will bear. What a racket!

author: Mint.
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 02:31:32 am
content: Gumtree a fantastic website that I used to buy and sell my things on recently became very expensive. Such a shame to lose a quality site such as Gumtree.

author: joelby
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 03:11:28 am
content: Isn't it still free to post advertisements on Gumtree? Just ignore the highlight/top ad/urgent/homepage gallery stuff.

author: iloveelectronics
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 04:04:00 am
content: Quote from: flash.pc on April 02, 2013, 12:34:55 amThat paypal fee is still low compared to what I'm paying on this side of the world. I pay 3.9% plus $0.3 per “cross border” transaction, which basically mean every single transaction!As for eBay/paypal holding your payments, that won't be an issue anymore once you have established enough good history.

author: nukie
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 05:27:45 am
content: EBay protects buyers more than sellers, once the sellers are gone let's see where they find the buyers.Sent from my Nexus 10 using Tapatalk 2

author: poorchava
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 05:49:30 am
content: Luckily in Poland ebay is not that popular. Allegro.pl functions as the main suction site (they were simply first to do that on a large scale in PL). We also quite often use Gumtree and few other boards like that. I personally use ebay only for buying stuf from China.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 07:06:06 am
content: Quote from: poorchava on April 02, 2013, 05:49:30 amI want to know more about these "suction" sites.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 07:09:12 am
content: In China eBay is losing out to competition like Taobao. I can only hope a similar thing happens in the UK, and other countries. Fees of a couple percent are acceptable, but not 10%+!

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 07:11:54 am
content: Quote from: sleemanj on April 02, 2013, 12:31:01 amGumtree is owned by Ebay!But it is free.We also have an alternative to PayPal called PayMate. Ebay didn't want to accept PayMate of course, but a government investigation into the ebay/paypal monopoly and potential illegal practices forced them to accept PayMate.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 07:13:27 am
content: Quote from: nukie on April 02, 2013, 05:27:45 amEbay is a buyers paradise, the protection offered by PayPal is actually very good. So good in fat that people are taking advantage of it and saying they have not received the goods when in fact they have, and getting a refund.Sellers have not been allowed to leave negative feedback for buyers for along time now.

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 07:45:53 am
content: Quote from: tom66 on April 02, 2013, 07:09:12 amYou can only really vaguely compare eBay and Taobao.Taobao is like a street-market bazaar like you might see on some movie in a middle east or asian country with the protagonists getting accosted at every turn by a hundred people trying to convince them to buy their wares. It is hideously disorganised, a lot of the stuff is not actually for sale, or not at the advertised price, or not in stock, even searching is completely hit-and-miss depending on which of the bajillion subdomains/sections of the Taobao site you are looking at.Taobao would never work in a western country, it would drive people mad.I have bought quite a lot from Taobao sellers, but it's not something the average eBay buyer should attempt - even if it was in English!

author: grumpydoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 07:52:35 am
content: Quote10% in the UK - plus listing fee unless it's a "technology related" item when it's 5%. Sadly that doesn't cover T&M but computing, consoles, photography, mobiles and sound&vision. Then there is the paypal fee which here is 3.4% plus £0.20.I generally use 15% as a rough figure when estimating ebay's slice of the auction price.Which is fairly good as auction houses go. In the UK there is a "buyer's premium" typically of 15-20% and then VAT is added on top so the buyer can easily end up paying 45% more than the price at which the hammer fell.Perhaps it would have been psychologically better for sellers if ebay had structured its prices in this way with the seller getting "all" of the final price and ebay charging buyers. I don't think they'll change now so we'll all just have to live with the way things are. I doubt that it would increase sellers' revenue though - buyers would just adjust the amount they were prepared to pay downwards to adjust for the fees.QuoteLike it or not that's because consumer legislation favours buyer's rights over those of sellers.QuoteThis is a pain and something which, I think, ebay need to sort out. It's one thing to support consumer rights but it's unacceptable that they seem to facilitate and even encourage people ripping sellers off. It seems especially troublesome in some categories (thankfully electronics doesn't seem too bad for this).

author: iloveelectronics
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 08:02:46 am
content: Quote from: sleemanj on April 02, 2013, 07:45:53 amAs a Chinese speaking person I actually think Taobao is far superior than eBay. The entire system allows so much more flexibilty both for the sellers and buyers. The street market analogy is very good. In many cases you need to live chat with the seller to work out/confirm a deal, but thats exactly what I like, you actually get to talk to the seller before commiting to a purchase. That gives you a good sense of whether he's honest. Their system also allows people to rate individual items, not just a purchase as a whole. Now I think you can even share pictures of actual items you received.

author: mswhin63
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 09:10:23 am
content: That is interesting, we have been cutting over to Gumtree recently due to the high fees but I imagine there is possibly some changes going to happen with that site as well when eBay wish to tighten the market.I wonder how free it will be in the future.Quote from: EEVblog on April 02, 2013, 07:11:54 am

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 11:56:35 am
content: They upped the fees because Visa and Mastercard and other card processors started or will start to charge them more for transactions because Paypal and Ebay refuse to share with them customer data (what they generally buy, how much the average transaction is, stuff like that)http://news.investors.com/technology/031413-648009-ebay-shares-rebound-after-pay-pal-fee-impact.htmhttp://news.investors.com/technology/031913-648531-ebay-stock-upgraded-to-buy-by-analyst.htmhttp://www.finextra.com/News/FullStory.aspx?newsitemid=24648

author: metalphreak
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 12:43:12 pm
content: The final value fee actually went down if you have one of the featured stores... which is $49.95 per month. But now it includes 200 free fixed price listings a month. They are definitely gearing it up to be more of a fixed price volume seller kind of business rather than an everyman's yard sale.As for paypal protection and being a seller... just send everything with tracking or proof of postage. It's actually cheaper to send through AusPost's click and send with tracking, than to take it into a post office.Are they still doing XX Free Listings per month for regular sellers? If so, they are just moving that cost into the final value fee instead.All the constant changes are doing is pissing people off. They're trying to make it seem cheaper to sell by having "free listings" and whatnot while maintaining the same profit through increased final value fees. Typical marketing BS.As Dave said, Ebay owns and runs Gumtree, as it's an anti-monopoly thing. They provide a free alternative (and they do advertise it occasionally on ebay.com) and it gets the regulators off their back. Hasn't stopped them adding all sorts of random ridiculous fees to it though. Pay $100 to have your ad flash on everyone's screen as they browse etc etc

author: KJDS
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 01:37:35 pm
content: I try not to look too often at how much I pay ebay each month. I'm almost at the point where an ecommerce website is worthwhile paying for, but that won't be cheap and neither will driving new traffic to it.

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 02:01:39 pm
content: Quote from: KJDS on April 02, 2013, 01:37:35 pmSetting up an ecom site is the cheap and easy bit (my day job). Getting customers to it is the much bigger and more expensive problem - which is usually overlooked.eBay (or local equivalent) should always be a part of any small online retail business, no matter if they have their own site or not, simply because it's cheap and effective advertising.

author: mc
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 04:58:45 pm
content: Compared with other online payment options in the UK, for anybody not receiving more than a few thousand a year, PayPal isn't that bad. It's certainly not the cheapest, but it's also not the most expensive, and has the least number of hoops to jump through to use it.Ebay fees on the other hand are horrendous. 10% is a rip-off, and they've got the cheek to give you 'free listing' offers if you're a private seller, or if you're a buisness seller, if you sell enough and jump through enough hoops, you could earn upto 20% of your fees.

author: Mint.
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 09:00:09 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 02, 2013, 07:11:54 amNot free anymore!You have to pay for updating an ad after 2 hours of posting it as well as if you want to post it again you have to pay a fee now. The only workaround is if you do it manually each time, but that is too much of a hassle for some.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 10:39:40 pm
content: There are fees, but you can get around them by deleting the old ad and reposting, and in the UK, there are no fees for updating until the ad expires.

author: ddavidebor
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2013, 10:42:29 pm
content: We're speaking about final selling fees

author: Recyclojunk64
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 09:25:41 am
content: QuoteYou can actually get around that though by clicking cancel when it tries to charge you after you've reposted/edited your ad. The payment is only to bump up the ad.

author: peter.mitchell
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 10:23:02 am
content: The thing that I'm most annoyed about is the increase to the final value cap, going from 7.9% to 9.9% isn't so bad, if it is capped at $100 [as it currently is], because after $1200~ there is no difference, however, now they are increasing the final value cap to $250, which REALLY hurts, making the difference more significant.

author: mswhin63
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 10:31:58 am
content: I think it more the way eBay have steadily increased their fees slowly and manipulated them to achieve maximum profit. Most people do not understand that fee changes have been occurring for sometime now and each increase does not get noticed. The same thing happens here in Australia for fuel. Changing little bit at a time to lessen the impact over a longer period.Although Auction house charge 15% so the fees do not seem to unreasonable in one aspect but eBay will eventually limit it once they lose the revenue.

author: peter.mitchell
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 10:39:06 am
content: Don't get me started on fuel prices, out here it's shocking, for standard ULP its $1.55/L, PULP is somewhere between $1.65 and $1.70

author: djsb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 10:51:40 am
content: I've got a seller+ account on Ebid. I have lifetime zero listing and Zero final fees (cost me £49.49 though). Not used it yet though as there just isn't a lot of footfall compared to Ebay. I hope Ebid becomes more popular.David.

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 04:38:52 pm
content: QuoteExactly - the question is does having your product visible to ebay's huge user base add more than the fees to the selling price - chances are it does.Quote..not just small ones. Carefully selected listings can be very cheap advertising. Agilent's used ebay store is just a front-end for their existing reselling arm. No reason why any online business shouldn't use it in a similar way.Rapid and Maplin also have ebay stores.Another interesting example is a seller I noticed on Ebay UK :http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/top-quality-tools/m.html?_ipg=50&_sop=12&_rdc=1Who seems to be just scraping items from Farnell and ordering on demand.

author: tinhead
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 05:12:06 pm
content: Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on April 03, 2013, 04:38:52 pmindeed good idea

author: KJDS
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 05:21:38 pm
content: Quote from: tinhead on April 03, 2013, 05:12:06 pmWe've almost become conditioned to think that ebay is the cheapest place for buying something so we don't bother to check elsewhere.

author: snipersquad100
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 05:46:22 pm
content: Try ebid.com

author: iloveelectronics
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 05:58:40 pm
content: I guess one of the reasons why ebid isn't successful is that they don't even own the .com version of the web address. Their site is .net.Quote from: snipersquad100 on April 03, 2013, 05:46:22 pm

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2013, 06:49:46 pm
content: afaik that price hike os for commercial sellers...if you are one of the guys only listing a few items a month then you do not get dinged. the first 50 or so are exempt form this 9% ...Anyway, time for google to make a 'ebay clone'. they already have free google shipping in SV ...We are entering a 'bubble' when it comes to this online commerce / shipping. rates are going through the roof .... even USPS has yanked their flat shipping from 16.95 to 23.95 in one go... cause they are loosing money on it... and then there is the customs markup if you go international.open market open borders my 'shiny metal ass'....

author: ve7xen
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2013, 03:30:12 am
content: They get away with it for the same reason Apple gets away with 30%. They have a de-facto monopoly on the potential customers, so they can be a do-nothing middle man and take whatever cut they want until they make it more worthwhile to send stuff to scrap. IMO it is capitalism at its worst, there's little to control it, competitors can't feasibly gain traction to create a competitive market and it just saps money out of the economy.But at least it's 'acceptable' commerce. The tying to PayPal is blatant anti-trust IMO.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2013, 11:54:14 am
content: I've long wished ebay and paypal would hurry up and die so some sane competition could develop.But it isn't going to happen, so long as business method patents are allowed. That's the ultimate cause of the ebay/paypal mess. Competition can't develop, since ebay owns the patents.Oh that, and how much the Elites *hate* that ordinary people can just go ahead and trade stuff with each other internationally using the net at the moment. You thought ebay wants to be a usable auction site? Wrong! Ebay wants to be a completely non-functional auction site, while preventing anyone else from being successful, and also making it look like ebay are merely acting from over-zealous profit-seeking, not actually trying to shut down international person-to-person trading.

author: peter.mitchell
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2013, 12:40:12 pm
content: An interesting thing JUST happened to me;Made a listing on eBay (quite expensive), but my high eBay selling limits let me list it.It was bought almost immediately.The value for the auction was deducted from my total selling limit.The auction was then cancelled by an automated eBay system, because the account that purchased it was compromised.I am now unable to relist the auction because my item is more than my remaining limits.Well, that sucks.

author: metalphreak
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2013, 01:59:17 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on April 03, 2013, 06:49:46 pmOnly the listing fee is free for the first whatever. You still pay the final value fee. They've done it so more people list items because there's no "risk" ie paying fees without it selling. Instead, they make up that loss (and more) with the increased 9.9%.I'm only paying 7% now, save $20 by having 200 free listings, and "technology category" items are 5% if the value is over $200. Like I said, it's gearing up ebay for people who are running it more as a business than casual sellers. IMO, they're pushing away even the smaller higher volume sellers. They ditched the $20 store option before which pissed a lot of people off (and now its back).I've put up rather uncommon IT stuff before, and it's sold literally within hours for very good prices (as buy it now auctions/best offer etc). Getting 90% of the profit quickly is better than 100% of the loss when something sits around for ever.

author: bookaboo
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2013, 02:06:03 pm
content: Has been 10% in the UK for quite some time. It's a huge chunk of any profit margin, I have a feeling that many ebay import/resell businesses are operating on wafer thin profits. I had a look at doing some bulk imports but calculated that the only way some people could be making money was if they weren't paying they VAT (sales tax) to the government.Furthermore, their "Top Rated Seller" discount is a laughable 10% off fees. To qualify for that you have to be whiter than white, you can have 100% feedback over thousands of sales but if just 0.5% of buyers give you a low rating on any of the criteria you are out.The gap is there for google or amazon. I think if sellers saw a fairer deal they would flock to that site and "play ball" by listing a few % cheaper than ebay.