Ebay - the real cost

SimonDance

I have been thinking of selling some of my records on Ebay to raise a little extra cash for uni, but considering the 'cost' of selling on ebay, there really doesn't seem much point.

On considering,
- Listing fees (do i start the auctions at 5 pence and add a sense of risk to my item auctions, or £2?
- Sellers fees - a proportion goes back to ebay
- Transaction fees (ebay/ paypal takes a cut to use ebay)
- Postage
- Transfer fee (transfer money from paypal to my account).

So if i am selling a record, which I might sell for £4, then with any luck i might walk away with £0.25! a record!

It amazes me why ebay is so popular..... rant over.

tomstickland

costs about 20p to list an item with a BIN of a few pounds.
Final value fee is a few percent of the sale price.
P&P can include the labour cost of packing etc.

You should be able to make a few pounds on each record.

me4bargains

I dont think records are that lucrative unless it is a rare copy.
I have bought records that will go for more than £20 at specialists fairs for less than a fiver!!

robinson79

i've had both success and disaster....
sold a signed bjork cd i won in a competition for £56
and a beatles abbey road LP for £26 :T
trouble is, the beatles record got lost in the post to russia :rolleyes:
i've ended up out of pocket, as royalmail only refunded me the sale price, and not the postage! AND i lost my £26 profit!
can i claim again for my lost profit ?
x

Sugar_Coated_Owl

So the Beatles LP sold for just £1? Why was the postage so high?

mclaren_2

razorbladekisses wrote:

So the Beatles LP sold for just £1? Why was the postage so high?

high postage on small value item is called fee avoidance

rose_sparky

I think Robinson meant LP instead of 1p.

Hintza

simon I suggest to acquaint yourself fully with how Ebay (and Paypal if appropriate) works and the fee structures associated with it. You have leapt to a lot of conclusions which are wrong.

On the above example I would expect fees to be around 25% of your price.

Contains_Mild_Peril

SimonDance wrote:

I have been thinking of selling some of my records on Ebay to raise a little extra cash for uni, but considering the 'cost' of selling on ebay, there really doesn't seem much point.

On considering,
- Listing fees (do i start the auctions at 5 pence and add a sense of risk to my item auctions, or £2?

Listing fee for items with a start price or Buy It Now only price of 99p or less is 15p. For £1-4.99, it's 20p. The real killer is that these fees apply even to unsold items, which can mount up. Listing with a start price of 5p is inadvisable for most items, because if only 1 person bids, they only pay 5p even if they would have been willing to pay much more, so you make a loss.

- Sellers fees - a proportion goes back to ebay

5.25% for cheapish items

- Transaction fees (ebay/ paypal takes a cut to use ebay)

Paypal fees on incoming payments are 20p + 4% of the total amount, which works out a ridiculous proportion of the sale price of low value items with high p&p costs. You can leave Paypal alone and select only, for instance, cheque and postal order as accepted payment methods, though many customers prefer Paypal. Though you're not allowed to tick the box for accepting Paypal unless you take all Paypal payments (which involves a fee-paying account), I mention in my ads that I can accept Paypal payments from a Paypal balance, or in most cases from a bank account which doesn't use a debit card. There are no "transaction fees" over and above those already mentioned, so if payment is non-Paypal, you only pay listing fees and Final Value Fees.

- Postage

The customer pays postage (which the seller normally specifies in the listing) on top of the winning bid price or Buy It Now price. Since p&p for fragile records isn't cheap, this does mean that customers generally won't bid a lot of money unless it's a rare record, but the p&p is in addition to the bid price (unless the seller says otherwise).

- Transfer fee (transfer money from paypal to my account).

If you manage to amass £50 or more you can withdraw it for free. If not, then you would probably still receive payment for more than one transaction before you'd pay the 25p to withdraw it (which takes several days). Alternatively, you can spend your Paypal money on ebay and thus avoid withdrawal fees!

So if i am selling a record, which I might sell for £4, then with any luck i might walk away with £0.25! a record!

If £4 is the winning bid price, and we suppose a start price of 99p, payment by Paypal withdrawn an average of every 5 transactions and p&p of, say, £2.50 charged at cost, if my calculations are correct, the total fees would be 87p, leaving you with £3.13. If the record in our example attracted only 1 bidder and sold for 99p, you'd pay fees of 59p and be left with only 28p :eek:

It amazes me why ebay is so popular..... rant over.

It's so popular because its only rivals suffer from a severe shortage of customers, so they don't really provide sufficiently serious competition to drive ebay's prices down.

You could save a little on listing fees if you were to wait for their next 5p listing day, which they do every so often. The downside is that the market may then become flooded with loads of the things you're trying to sell.

robinson79

rose_sparky wrote:

I think Robinson meant LP instead of 1p.

yup, sold for £26... i got it free from my parents
postage charged £3.75 but actually cost me more than this.:mad:
so...does anyone know if i can claim my lost profit, £26 from the royal mail?
thanks
x

soolin

robinson79 wrote:

yup, sold for £26... i got it free from my parents
postage charged £3.75 but actually cost me more than this.:mad:
so...does anyone know if i can claim my lost profit, £26 from the royal mail?
thanks
x

I might not be following this properly, so forgive me if I have misunderstood. When you make a claim from the Royal mail you need to show them what you lost, so if you sold it for £26 on ebay then a copy of your ebay invoice should hav ebeen sufficient to reclaim that £26.

Therefore you have recovered your profit as apart from the p and p, you are in the same position you would have been if the seller had receievd the item.

Soo