eBay refiddles with auction fees

Plus premium listing fees plus paypal...

The buggers just won't stop, will they? After being forced down Paypal's pseudobank route as well, you're paying over 10% in fees. Why not just assign all your goods to ebay for them to do with as they please? We're moving in that direction.

Ebay, you know you're abusing your dominant market position. There's NO WAY to justify a 10% levy, it costs you the same to sell a 99p item as it does a £500 one, so you're just gouging.

<title>

Of course, you're welcome to write your own auction site... Or go back to putting classified adverts in local newspapers.

sucky ebay

Why can't they just do a fee based on finale price.

Then we the users can have eral prices showing up. instead of everything starting at 99p / 99c NO RESERVE etc etc. then shills come along and up the price.

No fun anymore

ebay has been dragged down by the professionals and the sharks. Auto sniping programs, every bloody auction gets a 'Do you have a buy it now price' comment, You can't search for anything because of the 'cleverly ' worded tags and paid-for promotions of unrelated items. It's a mess.

What I want is:

1. Auction only.

2. At the end of the auction a few random minutes are added to the time to prevent sniping.

3. The auction house does the escrow but not doesn't own the money transfer.

4. takes complaints seriously.

PR nonsense

Its a give at one end to take at the other, and wont really appease the low volume sellers , since they still block them from charging any postage unless the initial listing fee is above a certain amount , thus shifting the cost onto the seller.

I suspect Shareholders will enjoy the short jump they see in listings and sales, but itll tail off until the next big PR push.

UK higher

Oh those poor Yanks having it raised to 9% when it's been 10% in rip-off Britain for years.

And "media" items have to be free postage. Try posting a big book. That's UK-only too

Cheaper?

C'mon, you really don't think the'd have made these changes without modelling the outcome first based on the last few months' data?

Of COURSE it will make them more money, why else would they do it?

leaving negative feedback

Actually, you CAN leave negative feedback.

If there's a problem with your sale, simply report it to Ebay or Paypal and then the NEGATIVE option comes available, even before the matter is resolved.

I don't sell much on Ebay now, due to the prices, but I'll still use it to pick up "as-new" items for a fraction of the new cost or from second hand traders.

Bah!

I was hooked on E-Bay when it came to getting out-of-print books and such for a Role Playing Game I'd owned for years, then I found that Amazon could be just as inexpensive and infinity times more reliable as far as actually getting what was described in the original solicitation to buy.

I never got totally burned on eBay, but I had more and more "almost but not quite" stuff turning up when I bid (usually with "buy it now" since the oft-mentioned sniping software would otherwise drive the prices into the stratosphere).

I suppose I could have used such software myself, but having to give someone else credentials that I carefully selected to be secure seems a bit...counterproductive and time consuming, as to be safe I would have to replace the credentials right after an auction in order to be "secure" again.

As for the costs, it's always been 'whatever the market will stand". If people stop using the service, the prices will drop again. But they won't, because - when you get down to it - the prices aren't outrageous enough.

Yet.

Ripbay!

I used to sell lots of DVDs on ebay. With so many changes occuring on the site, its become impossible to make a tidy sum on old DVDs. DVDs generally dont sell for much anyway, sometimes less than £1. Thing is ebay seems to think that the postal system in the UK is free of charge.

By the time I pay the ebay fees, the paypal fees, the jiffy bag and postage, I am making a loss.

I wish a newer startup will soon appear - in the familiar Ebay style. Yahoo Auctions used to work well for me before it got pulled, I hope google come up with something soon...

Moving stuff away

I've been selling old vinyl disks on eBay for a few years and it used to be a profitable little sideline. These days, the fees and enforced "free" postage mean it's hard to make anything. Fake bidders are a problem, too and eBay has removed the only practical ways to block them. The free p&p thing was billed as being to keep buyers happy, but everyone knows p&p isn't really free. This just forces sellers include p&p in the item costs so that eBay get a bigger share of the total.

My solution? Build my own site to sell my stock of vinyl (over 7,000 disks at present) and use eBay auctions just as a way of advertising it. Every disk will now go out with a slip telling buyers they can buy the same things cheaper on TheTraxster.com. Don't bother looking it up just yet, cos it ain't finished yet. Try around the end of February though :-) Should save me around £10,000 per year.