How do ebay justify such high fees?

I don’t use eBay that much, for buying or selling, but recently thought it was time to sell on an old SLR camera and while I was at it, I may as well sell my old phone since I had my new upgrade. The process was very smooth, just how I had remembered from a few years ago.

The items went up with the standard 5 days to go, and I started to realise that eBay had changed from back around circa 2005 when people would make tiny bids over the days to eventually get you to a reasonable point. Now everyone looks, watches, but never bids. I’ve got 2 items with informative descriptions both sat there like a kitten in the jungle waiting for someone to pounce… nothing.

It isn’t until the last 30 minutes that the bids start rolling, and I get what I would admit was a fair amount for both items. I hadn’t felt like a lottery winner but nor had I felt like I should have kept either item. The emails come through, and I package up the items and take them to the post office to sell them, recorded delivery as expected.

Here is pain #1: to send an SLR camera 100 miles up north the post office (UK) wants £23.52, which is well above my quoted £10, so here come the eBay losses. I could ever have put more as all the other items were similarly priced for shipping.

Roll up pain #2: I realise that although the payer has completed the transaction quickly PayPal have decided that they are going to keep the payments for 21 days, you know, just to keep it safe. So at the moment I am quite out of pocket. They have my money, they have already taken their 3.4% plus 20p and I have nothing but a hefty receipt for postage.

Hit me with pain #3: It’s over a month after I’ve sold the items and I wondered – did eBay just take their fee from the PayPal account? I haven’t worked it out but it seemed like enough was missing to account for the listing fee. WRONG! – eBay bill me for £43.21 to sell 2 items, apparently this is the listing fee plus 10%, which of course is calculated from the total, not the total minus PayPal’s cut, so it’s really working out at over 10%. This is a fortune in comparison to any other online sales tool such as gumtree, paid classifieds, or eBay of yesteryear.

I wonder how many people would carry on selling through eBay in the future, and how people feel about these charges. EBay really aren’t carrying that much risk to need to take 10%, not like PayPal who only take 3.4%. To be honest it now feels like a complete rip off. I have been ripped off using eBay – by eBay!

In summary selling on eBay has cost roughly 15-20% of the sale cost, so any access to a bigger market has been lost in extremely high fees. While organisations struggle to make money online, others clearly find their way to making too much, which I hope opens up competition again. EBay may once have dominated, but how much room will there be for these fee’s in the online world of the future? I don’t think the fees represent any value that couldn’t be found elsewhere, shame on you eBay, I do not recommend you.