I sell over $ 120,000 a year on ebay with around 1000 - 1300 sales annually … So a few things.
Paypal and ebay fee combos will typically run you around 12-15 percent of the item sale price. You take that into account when setting the price.
If you have long term seller with good feedback rep you can trust that seller more than most big box retailers.
Ebay is super tough on Sellers. To maintain “preferred” status and the minor discounts it conveys I have to ship my sales within 24 hours or get dinged and I have to handle any customers issues immediately. And yes, this involves giving some refunds where the customer is playing you but you have to grin and move on.
Ebay is moving more toward a retail model where the buyer has absolute priority. I’ve been selling for 15 years and I have 100% feedback and if a customer disagrees with me I will lose. You accept this as a cost of doing business. In reality most people are quite reasonable and are not scam artists. You can’t blow up your entire business because a few bad apples aggravate you. Being super direct with people gains their confidence and being polite even with assholes costs you nothing. If you want your business to be successful YOU have to be the adult.
Ebay is not “declining” it is changing and while there are some significant teething problems with the way it implements new policies, for the most part hey have been improvements.
I have used Craig’s List and it’s largely a waste of time. I tried selling on Amazon but it was insanely complex to list items. Ebay gives me far superior results
Funny you should mention Amazon. I get the feeling eBay is moving more towards being more an online store (more like Amazon) than an auction site. Would you agree with that assessment?
I quit selling because of the hassles. Ebay is not seller friendly. However, it seems more and more there are a ton of bad sellers out there. People who it seems can’t be bothered to write an ad (they just take pictures), people who write generic ads with absolutely no detail, oftentimes using the wrong information, or even the wrong picture, or even people who use stock photos.
The worst are those who “think their shit doesn’t stink” - the ones who sell stuff worth $5 for $20, and then have the additional gall to ask $25 shipping. There is at least one guy that clogs my search results with his overpriced crap. I have to wade through that shit every day, and as far as I can tell, you can’t block individual sellers from your results. He even went to the trouble of making a fake overpriced ad to complain about buyers (I guess), though I’m not sure what his point was.
I’ve been an eBay member since around 2000 and I used to use it constantly, buying 1/3 of the time and selling 2/3 of the time.
But over the years, eBay has become much more heavy-handed with sellers. The process is much more restrictive and tedious and buyers have too much power.
In my auctions, I used to state my terms clearly and up front, and came to build on this list of terms over the years as problems arose. It got to be quite the speech but at least buyers knew exactly what was going on, what what was expected of them, and so on.
I used to say, “If you do not agree with my auction terms, please do not bid.” It seems fair enough. A while ago, eBay started saying something like, “You can’t say that in your auctions. It’s too negative and it scares away bidders and stifles commerce.”… Huh? It’s called streamlining commerce while covering one’s ass.
Recently, a buyer wasn’t happy with a purchase he made from me and instead of contacting me with his concerns he immediately filed a claim. Completely unnecessary and a huge overreaction. Instantly, eBay sucked $500 out of my bank account, not my PayPal account, but my bank account, and put me $300 in the red when I dont even have an overdraft. Gee, thanks. The bank asked me, “What are you doing?” and I said “What are you talking about, you let them have the money…Do I have an overdraft, or not? Man!”
Yeah, it stifles their commerce, since they get you going (listing fees) as well as coming (PayPal on a majority of sales). Their only goal is to keep the merchandise moving.
Over the years they kept making it more and more difficult for the small time sellers of one-off stuff. I did pretty well, but had to constantly adapt.
Finally they actually banned me from selling. I went from 100% perfect feedback in 16 years to 3 sudden complaints in one week, all due to the Post Office at Christmas time. It was the perfect storm and I was out of town. They slammed the door in my face and all you get then is automated replies telling you to go away.
I’m another who started using eBay early on, but no longer bother with it. I sold a lot of coins there, and bought a lot of Alaskana books. It seems like it’s just a pain in the ass to list things, and the fees are ridiculous. Then there’s the whole “the buyer is always right” bullshit that seems to be prevalent. I gave up on it a few years ago and have little intention of going back.
To be fair, I still buy lots of stuff. Mostly model car kit related stuff. There are people that part out kits that DON’T gouge on prices like the guy I mentioned, plus there are aftermarket sellers that have their own like of original parts. Combine that with the few sellers left who aren’t full-on businesses, and sometimes you can get a good deal. But you have to wade through a lot of crap to find them.
If Ebay is turning into a store, it’s more like a park-n-swap than a conventional store. Tons of people selling cheap import crap of sketchy quality, with a few gems here and there.
Oh and I did find a nice vintage Chevy pickup that was local that was a good deal. I saw the auction, but once I checked out the truck, he pulled the auction and just sold it to me.
I agree that listing is a complete pain in the rear. The listing page is wonky and Turbo Lister is non-functional for a lot of people, and from what I’m hearing, it won’t be supported much longer. They’re really pushing buying/selling via mobile, which is all right for some things, but also makes for crappy pics and the zero descriptions as mentioned above.
Full-priced, on-line retailers are better than when Ebay got rolling, and the overall cost is less fuzzy, because many Ebay purchases are hit or miss… with too many misses.
Not enough to cripple Ebay, but enough to take a chunk out of the business.
I would love to source more auto part through them, but it is more exhausting and confusing to go through them than I care to deal with.
Some of the Chinese stuff is just… bad… and clogs up a lot of space/time… so you have to trudge through it.
Ugh.
I use Ebay for very specialized stuff… the kind of thing that would only be on Ebay.
Another long time seller that no longer does it, although mostly because I lack the time and interest, but I echo a lot of the sentiments here…
I started back in 1999 with my wife and were both buyers and sellers. We would go through periods where we’d sell things from estate sales and other higher end items that we knew we could resell, always focusing on small items that were easy to ship (e.g. personnel electronics and jewelry) but that were also higher value.
First fees started going up, then shipping became a problem because eBay wanted to mandate what you could charge. While I never wanted to make a profit on shipping, it seems unreasonable to me that I couldn’t charge $1-$2 for the box itself, headache to wrap it up and label it, and my time and gas to get to the post office. Next the buyers became unreasonable regarding shipping times thanks to Amazon changing people’s expectations. For example, let’s say I have five auctions end on the same day. Buyer #1 pays me right away, but Buyer #5 takes five days to pay me. Ideally, I want to box everything up and take it to the Post Office in one trip after Buyer #5 pays me. But now Buyer #1 is ten shades of pissed off because he had to wait five days and I’m suddenly worse than Hitler. I started having to make MULTIPLE trips to the Post Office just to keep the crazy people satisfied. And soon after that, you had the scam buyers or foreign buyers who created problems. Quite often I would have a buyer snipe my auctions and win them, then never respond to numerous e-mails/invoices. Foreign buyers never seem to understand that the shipping price listed was “US only” and can’t understand why it is more to get the item to their country, so they only pay the US shipping price and then argue with you in broken English. Or they ask you to commit a crime on their behalf (“please mark the item as a ‘gift’ because customs adds taxes if you say it is a commercial item”).
I haven’t used it to buy or sell anything for at least five years.
GAAP sez you are wrong. You are allocating overhead and profit into the wrong expenses. And Priority mail gets you free boxes anyway.
Indeed, you could charge anything you wanted for those things, just put them into your selling price rather than trying to steal from eBay by calling then “shipping”. In any case, too many sellers were charging $25 for that box, not just $1.