Thinking about Selling On eBay?

Note: My experience selling on eBay is a mixed bag, especially lately. In general, Sellers expect to receive 60% more than the item usually sells for, and Buyers expect to buy items for 40% less than they actually spend. Combining all the fees associated with selling on eBay, the actual direct selling fees amount to 8.7%, plus an additional 2.6% to PayPal, meaning Sellers can expect to clear 89% of what they sell. Then add in the indirect selling costs, like Online access costs, packaging, etc and a Seller ends up with more like 75-80% of the selling price.

When selling the same item in a retail store, a Seller can easily get 15-20% more for their item than what it brings on eBay. Thus instead of eBay being a great sales avenue, it turns out to be roughly equivalent to running a retail store. Actually it probably will be slightly better; but not by more than about 10-15% of Sales.

The only real way of making worthwhile money on eBay is by either selling stuff where your cost of sales, (what you paid for the item) is less than half what you sell it for on eBay. If it exceeds 50% of the sale price, you're doing a lot of work for almost nothing.

The most unpleasant aspect of the whole online auction landscape is that in years gone by there were websites, (primarily I'm referring to Haggle Online), that did not charge Buyers or Sellers anything for doing almost exactly what eBay does. Haggle Online actually had more transactions at one time than eBay.

Worse yet, the depreciation of assets has snowballed online thanks to eBay's transactions. In the past, new equipment could be sold on eBay for 70-75% of it's street price, on average; but that has now slipped to 60% or less except for select "hot items".

Then a Seller gets to deal with the PITA 1%'ers. Most Sellers "feedback" from transactions is highly favorable with most Sellers achieving 96%+ positive ratings. Yet as in other realms of life, there will be about 1-3% of a Sellers transactions that cause problems, either from Buyer remorse, shipping damages, improperly described items, fraud by Buyers or Sellers, conceit, or just bad luck. It is not uncommon for a "bad transaction" to gobble up hours of time attempting to address the fallout from these dealings. In a retail environment these bad transactions usually end up favoring the Seller; but online with eBay they usually favor the Buyer.

So if you have a bunch of stuff that you paid almost nothing for, and can easily triple your cost of sales as a selling price, you will probably end up being satisfied with eBay. Otherwise, there may be a better alternative such as listings in "Bargain Publications", Flea Markets, or a Co-Op Retail store.

Am I staying with eBay? In brief: yes, for the time being. Am I evangelical about eBay? No. It's just another in a long line of Big Businesses that control a market segment at a point in time. Any company that earns income from transactions with twenty million people or more acts like a utility company; ie: "we have what you need, and we are the only place you can go to get it, so either go with the program, or try to get what you need somewhere else"; "your individual business means almost nothing to us."