When Did Ebay Become Such a Rip Off

Flyonthewall

motorguy wrote: »

Yes, but the point is, they should be a lot cheaper - it all online and they dont stock your item. An auction house has a physical auctioneer standing there, they have to have premises and storage to stock the items and admin people to handle the buyers and the sellers.

Ebay is all online so how come they still need over 25% in fees?

You realise that people do work for ebay and they need to pay their wages, they have the website costs, they need to pay for the buildings they're in and the services they use (electric, internet, phones etc).

Ebay isn't some weird black hole just sucking in all your money and giving it to one guy who owns ebay as he stands there doing nothing. They have many costs the same as an auction house does. Chances are their costs are actually way higher. Not cheap to run such a site.

Edit: Forgot to add, ebay and Paypal fees are a total of 13.4% and 20p (plus a possible 35p listing fee), not 25%. And they keep doing offers. It may work out at 25% with a very low value item and a listing fee included, but overall their fees are not that high.

blisteringblue

Quite a debate going now, but at the end of the day a fixed price for selling whether your item is 0.99 or £100 is hard to swallow.

I just preferred the old days when you listed on your phone and started it at £0.99 you could list as many as you wanted for free. They still get their fees at the end.

20 free items a month is quite restrictive. I'm sat here with a pile of DVDs I have to wait until Sept now to sell.

Flyonthewall

blisteringblue wrote: »

Quite a debate going now, but at the end of the day a fixed price for selling whether your item is 0.99 or £100 is hard to swallow.

I just preferred the old days when you listed on your phone and started it at £0.99 you could list as many as you wanted for free. They still get their fees at the end.

20 free items a month is quite restrictive. I'm sat here with a pile of DVDs I have to wait until Sept now to sell.

35p is nothing really if you sell an item at £100.

It was for 100 listings, not unlimited.

Personally, I'd rather start at any price even if I can only list 20 items. I have items I want to sell and wouldn't want to risk them going for 99p, but I wouldn't want to pay a fee to list them at a higher start price.

That's why I suggested bundles before. Doesn't really matter if they're big bundles, people are often happy to buy bundles. More so when they're Disney. You could still put them up on Amazon. You may sell some over the next month. Or as already suggested, there are other options.

soolin

blisteringblue wrote: »

Quite a debate going now, but at the end of the day a fixed price for selling whether your item is 0.99 or £100 is hard to swallow.

I just preferred the old days when you listed on your phone and started it at £0.99 you could list as many as you wanted for free. They still get their fees at the end.

20 free items a month is quite restrictive. I'm sat here with a pile of DVDs I have to wait until Sept now to sell.

That was only a limited offer though, admittedly it ran for a couple of years but previous to the free 99p starts it cost a lot more than nowadays. In the good old days you even had to pay for a gallery picture- 15p extra from memory.

In those good old days a free listing day basically meant that everything else came to a standstill, you might only get 2 or 3 a year if you were lucky and would cancel days out just to spend 18 hours listing rubbish to avoid the huge listing fees.

If you want free listings go to Amazon or ebid, both allow you to list for free, no need to wait until September (or the next FLE )

blisteringblue

Will have a look around at other options. I'm in no mad rush to sell them, been sat in boxes in the loft for a couple of years.

Flyonthewall

blisteringblue wrote: »

20 free items a month is quite restrictive. I'm sat here with a pile of DVDs I have to wait until Sept now to sell.

blisteringblue wrote: »

Will have a look around at other options. I'm in no mad rush to sell them, been sat in boxes in the loft for a couple of years.

I thought the whole point of the topic was that you wanted rid and didn't like that it had gone from 100 to 20 listings free. If you're in no rush to sell what difference does it make?

20 at a time is easier to deal with surely and isn't it better being able to start at a higher price considering there are plenty of Disney DVDs worth more than 99p?

motorguy

Flyonthewall wrote: »

Buying sites is not the same as all sites. Buying sites, at least to me, are those like Music Magpie. Set price for specific items. Sites who buy off you.

To get the best price, you need to look at all sites and ways of selling. Those who buy from you, those who offer trade ins, those you sell on, carboots, sites where you post adverts and social media.

Getting the best price from buying sites is very different to getting the best overall price.

Indeed. Though personally, the thought of pitching up for a morning at a car boot sale to have someone pawing over my stuff and bidding me 10p doesnt appeal much. But if thats your bag....

Flyonthewall wrote: »

I said in my last post that CDs have lost their value. Regardless, it is still possible to get more. It applies more to other forms of media, but a lot of CDs are 10p or less on buying sites whereas selling elsewhere you could get more. Carboot, even at 20p you're getting double the amount.

If you've got, for example, 100 CDs. You may only sell half at a carboot, but then again the buying sites will probably only buy half anyway. 20-50p at a carboot. 10p most from the buying sites. May only be pence, but it adds up.

And then you factor in the cost of your pitch at the car boot sale, your fuel to get there, your time lost on a saturday morning when you be doing other things, that coffee you bought to keep warm, etc, etc and there may not be much difference in flogging to an online buyer.

Flyonthewall wrote: »

May not always be worth selling CDs on ebay, depends what they are. Certainly worth it sometimes for other media though and certainly almost always possible to get more money for them elsewhere than through buying sites. Games especially.

I sold games for a couple of months on ebay - buying up console bundles and splitting them. To be honest, it wasnt worth the hassle selling the games on ebay - one in ten said they couldnt get the game to work on their console, so you'd end up either accepting a refund and the hassle or letting them keep it. I found that 90% of the time you could get as much after fees and postage costs as you could from a buying site anyway.

Flyonthewall wrote: »

I agree that ebay isn't how it used to be for private sellers. I think most buyers are genuine though and it all depends on how you list your items.

Stating a disc is in good condition, for example. Can look good, doesn't mean it works. I had a new disc, not a scratch on it, but it didn't do a thing. Also good condition to you may not be the same as good to someone else. You may think a bigger scratch isn't that bad, they may have just expected a few light scratches. If you state it has that big scratch then they're aware of it and if they open a not as described case you can point out that you did mention it.

So many people don't bother with (proper) descriptions and then they get annoyed and think ebay is all a big scam when they're buyer isn't happy.

Not always the case, of course. However, as much as ebay side with buyers and certain terms/features make it harder for private seller, there are some private sellers out there who make it worse for themselves and then they blame ebay.[

Heres the trouble i went to - i bought an industrial disc scratch remover (not some £10 thing from ebay) and a supply of brand new cases. All games were checked and if at all scratched were polished and then tested. Cases were replaced if damaged, worn or scratched. Games were advertised with actual photos and genuine honest descriptions.

To maintain a 99.99%+ feedback you had to "put up with" people who you knew were chancers returning duff discs in place of your refurbed one, or chancing their arm saying it was faulty and hoping for a refund without return.

Games controllers - got a dirty faulty one back when i sent out a clean working tested one.

And then on top of all that, ebay were stiffing you with fees. :eek:

Not worth the hassle. When i saw a bundle that was underpriced i'd sell the hardware off all seperately (and just take my chances on the odd return) and sell 90% of the games to online buyers.

motorguy

Flyonthewall wrote: »

You realise that people do work for ebay and they need to pay their wages, they have the website costs, they need to pay for the buildings they're in and the services they use (electric, internet, phones etc).

Uh huh. And if you took 100 items to a local auction, someone would have to examine, catalogue and store that, then process your details as a customer, then auction the item, then process the buyer then process the payment to you. All done manually.

All done automatically by ebay, so why the big fees?

Flyonthewall wrote: »

Ebay isn't some weird black hole just sucking in all your money and giving it to one guy who owns ebay as he stands there doing nothing. They have many costs the same as an auction house does. Chances are their costs are actually way higher. Not cheap to run such a site.

Do they manually process each and every item? No
Do they catalogue each item manually? No
Do they have a storage warehouse to store your stock and hold the auction? No
Do they manually take a payment and process it? No

Genuinely cant believe (a) you're justifying ebays pricing and (b) you cant see the economies of scale they have. :rolleyes:

Flyonthewall wrote: »

Edit: Forgot to add, ebay and Paypal fees are a total of 13.4% and 20p (plus a possible 35p listing fee), not 25%. And they keep doing offers. It may work out at 25% with a very low value item and a listing fee included, but overall their fees are not that high.

Uh huh and my example was on a £2.00 buy it now item - the price of a typical CD, which totals over 25% in fees.

You really are an ebay apologist arent you?

soolin

motorguy wrote: »

Indeed. Though personally, the thought of pitching up for a morning at a car boot sale to have someone pawing over my stuff and bidding me 10p doesnt appeal much. But if thats your bag....




And then you factor in the cost of your pitch at the car boot sale, your fuel to get there, your time lost on a saturday morning when you be doing other things, that coffee you bought to keep warm, etc, etc and there may not be much difference in flogging to an online buyer.




I sold games for a couple of months on ebay - buying up console bundles and splitting them. To be honest, it wasnt worth the hassle selling the games on ebay - one in ten said they couldnt get the game to work on their console, so you'd end up either accepting a refund and the hassle or letting them keep it. I found that 90% of the time you could get as much after fees and postage costs as you could from a buying site anyway.



Heres the trouble i went to - i bought an industrial disc scratch remover (not some £10 thing from ebay) and a supply of brand new cases. All games were checked and if at all scratched were polished and then tested. Cases were replaced if damaged, worn or scratched. Games were advertised with actual photos and genuine honest descriptions.

To maintain a 99.99%+ feedback you had to "put up with" people who you knew were chancers returning duff discs in place of your refurbed one, or chancing their arm saying it was faulty and hoping for a refund without return.

Games controllers - got a dirty faulty one back when i sent out a clean working tested one.

And then on top of all that, ebay were stiffing you with fees. :eek:

Not worth the hassle. When i saw a bundle that was underpriced i'd sell the hardware off all seperately (and just take my chances on the odd return) and sell 90% of the games to online buyers.

Actually, as you were buying to sell you were/are a business and as such are not entitled to the free listings anyway.

motorguy

soolin wrote: »

Actually, as you were buying to sell you were/are a business and as such are not entitled to the free listings anyway.

Indeed, though from memory i got a certain amount free from having an ebay store. Cant really remember.

Not saying its not viable for business btw, just that for private sellers, a good percentage of the time its not worth the hassle, and is no longer the only or default option.