Letter to ebay---fees too high

[1962savoy]

HI FRIENDS..I have decided to write Ebay and bitch about their seller fees. I am not sure whats going to be done about it but heres the letter i wrote and mailed :

Feb 20. 2012

Dear EBAY.

Firstly I would like to congratulate you on coming up with a great way for the general public to sell . I have been an EBAY member for quite some time now both buying and selling items that are of interest to me. You definitely have the best game in town….however… the seller fees are just getting out of hand and are quite expensive as compared to the past. With your purchase of PayPal I am sure that you have your bills to pay also and that’s understandable. I do love the services and I do realize services cost money but with the increase of your fees, the items I am selling just are not worth me doing anymore. I will continue to buy items but as far as selling…I am entertaining the thought of moving to EBIDS or the like.
If you will look at my purchase records, I do buy a lot of things for my classic car. Members of the B-Body mopar forum are having the exact same thoughts as I am concerning this, and the over 7,000 members all agree that your fees are out of hand and just are not worth selling on EBAY any longer.
I have been selling a lot of guitars and musical gear on eBay and when I get the bill for the fees, they are astronomical and my immediate thought is “ why am I doing this ?” I can sell this stuff on Craigslist or the local paper free of charge, the only downfall is the protection and getting payment to a buyer a long distance from me. But that is a chance I am willing to take.
Many EBAY sellers I know have the very same concerns and I am not sure who this letter will reach and what can be done about it, but I am willing to try.

Bottom line is EBAY IS JUST TOO EXPENSIVE TO USE ANYMORE !
David L***** daveydavey42264

My thoughts are the same!!! :sSig_conspiracy:They have been taking 23% of the final sale but where you going to go with the same amount of traffic??????:moparts ghost:

 

[bigmanjbmopar]

This thread has gone south, Selling on Ebay as a business is one thing I'm sure most of us here are intelligent enough to understand what the "cost of doing business" means. I personally would never have a business on ebay that's just me.

I think the rest of us who sell just to get rid of stuff clogging up the garage or just trying to make a few bucks on something that has been sitting a long time so we can buy some thing we want is why we rant about fee's.

For those of us who fit this category the fee's are outrageous and will no longer be tolerated period. bye bye eripoff you can have it.

 

[Bruzilla]

Again, I go back to the guy selling that dash last year. He wasn't a business, just a guy who wanted to offload a dash he had replaced. $50 for that unit was a real buy, but he couldn't sell it because he couldn't expose it to enough potential buyers using a free site like CL.

 

[tpodwdog]

This is a great sumation, and very logical and business savy.

My wife is a much more frequent seller than I am, even though she has only been doing it for about 1 year where as I have been doing it for several more.

We had this discussion the other day, and she brought up that the fees were nowhere near the costs of doing business out of a brick and mortar store and the potential world-wide market was tough to beat.

Pretty sharp cookie, if you ask me!

thats all fine and well... but i dont use ebay for my business...and im guessing that the people that are with me on this aren't either. ebay businesses only pay 10%. the average schmuck pays alot more than that and thats my point.WE DONT USE EBAY FOR BUSINESS! i agree that ebay is great for business but youre completely missing the point here! for the average Joe trying to sell items that he or she no longer needs is getting RAPED by both ebay and paypal....and for those that dont know EBAY OWNS PAYPAL,SKYPE...AND IM SURE MORE!......and thats my point weather you can understand it or not! if i had an online business ....ebay would be the first medium i would use, but thats not the case here! WE ARE NOT "HIGH VOLUME SELLERS". its like taxes for gods sakes...the rich pay a lower percentage than the poor do....same thing here....WHAT PART OF THIS AINT YOU PEOPLE GETTING?????

 

[marlabuck]

My thoughts are the same!!! :sSig_conspiracy:They have been taking 23% of the final sale but where you going to go with the same amount of traffic??????:moparts ghost:[/QUOTE....

:spider: God your little computer guy just cracked me up...Marla :laughing9::laughing9::laughing9:

 

[Bruzilla]

thats all fine and well... but i dont use ebay for my business...and im guessing that the people that are with me on this aren't either. ebay businesses only pay 10%. the average schmuck pays alot more than that and thats my point.WE DONT USE EBAY FOR BUSINESS! i agree that ebay is great for business but youre completely missing the point here! for the average Joe trying to sell items that he or she no longer needs is getting RAPED by both ebay and paypal....and for those that dont know EBAY OWNS PAYPAL,SKYPE...AND IM SURE MORE!......and thats my point weather you can understand it or not! if i had an online business ....ebay would be the first medium i would use, but thats not the case here! WE ARE NOT "HIGH VOLUME SELLERS". its like taxes for gods sakes...the rich pay a lower percentage than the poor do....same thing here....WHAT PART OF THIS AINT YOU PEOPLE GETTING?????

I think what you're not getting is it doesn't matter if you're selling a few things for little money or a big business. Where are you going to sell your goods for less than what eBay charges AND that offers you as good a chance at selling your item?

Once again, the guy selling the dash wasn't a business, just a guy selling a spare dash he didn't need. Had he sold it for $100 on eBay, he would have only gotten $77 after fees, but by limiting his market using Craigslist he couldn't get anything, not even the $50 he was looking for. Suppose he ran an ad in the Jacksonville paper. That would have cost him $29, so he would have made $21 after paying the paper. Or worse, he could run the ad and not get any responses, in which case he would be at -$29. He could take it to an auction house in St. Augustine, but he would have paid 7% more to sell it than eBay charges, and that's assuming anyone bid it up to $50.

When it comes to selling, be it a little or a lot, you get what you pay for. Craigslist costs you nothing, but offers very limited results. eBid costs less than eBay, but there isn't much traffic to the site. eBay gives you maximum efficiency at a price that's lower than running unproductive ads in papers or craigslist. What it sounds like you want is, to quote another forum member, Superman marketing at Clark Kent prices, and that's not gonna happen.

 

[YY1]

Just like everyting else, if you buy in volume, you get a better price.

Capitalism.

Good?

Bad?

Is!

 

[Bruzilla]

Unless you're buying gasoline.

 

[YY1]

Oh, boy...at work we buy gas and diesel in quantities of about three to five tank trucks full per quarter.

We certianly DO get a price break at that quantity.

The last time I asked, I think it was about 33 cents /gal.

 

[bigmanjbmopar]

I think what you're not getting is it doesn't matter if you're selling a few things for little money or a big business. Where are you going to sell your goods for less than what eBay charges AND that offers you as good a chance at selling your item?

Once again, the guy selling the dash wasn't a business, just a guy selling a spare dash he didn't need. Had he sold it for $100 on eBay, he would have only gotten $77 after fees, but by limiting his market using Craigslist he couldn't get anything, not even the $50 he was looking for. Suppose he ran an ad in the Jacksonville paper. That would have cost him $29, so he would have made $21 after paying the paper. Or worse, he could run the ad and not get any responses, in which case he would be at -$29. He could take it to an auction house in St. Augustine, but he would have paid 7% more to sell it than eBay charges, and that's assuming anyone bid it up to $50.

When it comes to selling, be it a little or a lot, you get what you pay for. Craigslist costs you nothing, but offers very limited results. eBid costs less than eBay, but there isn't much traffic to the site. eBay gives you maximum efficiency at a price that's lower than running unproductive ads in papers or craigslist. What it sounds like you want is, to quote another forum member, Superman marketing at Clark Kent prices, and that's not gonna happen.

"Where are you going to sell your goods for less than what eBay charges AND that offers you as good a chance at selling your item?"

Some times it comes down to what we had before there even was an ebay, it's called a news paper or a flee market or a swap meet. You are stuck on this getting the word out to sell an item, who cares? Most of the time we are selling our left overs and really don't care if they sell or not.

If you sell quantity on ebad good for you hey maybe I have even bought something from you but for the average Joe it does not matter, for the current fee structure sux and isn't worth it.

And you can blather on about the guy and his dam dash on craigslist all day don't matter either.

 

[BuckNeccid]

As much as I hate the fees for selling on e-Bay, I always try to consider that it's reaching a HUGE market, and compare it to what we used to (and still do to a degree) have: Classified Ads. Call your local newspaper and see what an unlimited word ad with photos would cost you, for only your local market.

My big irritation with them now is policy.

For several years I've been selling flechettes on e-Bay, then about 4 months ago, out of the blue, I had my listing pulled and told they weren't allowed. I made several calls and could never get an answer as to WHY they couldn't be sold, BUT did get told that e-bay has some "Secret" policies they don't tell the seller about. When I asked how we could know these policies, they told me we'd just have to figure them out, otherwise we'd know how to work around them. HUH???? Anyway, after about 7 phone calls, they finally hinted my ad was a little too graphic and someone on thier board felt it was not PC.

OK, I changed my listing, only had about a 3 line listing, sold a couple more batches, and suddenly, I'm pulled AGAIN, because they cannot be shipped to CA, and maybe other states, but I have to figure out other states that won't allow it.

Funny thing tho... there are several other sellers selling the same item, for a much higher price. Some of the other listings were much more graphic than mine, and even stated they were batched up ready to be loaded into shot gun shells. When this first started, I tried reporting those same sellers, trying to find my violation, NONE were pulled. All I can figure is one of the other sellers has some sort of inside connection, and because I could sell 1 lb for approx what they were selling 1 OZ, I became a target.

It's so disgusted me that something I really used to enjoy has become something that I've not even visited in over 2 months now. Seller since 1999, 100% positve for that entire period

 

[99ss]

did a search and there are a few auctions of them on there right now

 

[MoparMuscleGuy]

They will probably charge your PayPal account for reading the letter. MMG

 

[99ss]

The brick and mortar argument is stupid. Who opens a store to sell one or two items?
Ebay used to be reasonable, they are not anymore. Anyone remember the ebay boycott and then ebay dropped their fee's?
The power is in the people simple as that and if there was another site to compete with it the prices would come down simple as that.
Amazon sucks too. 49.99 a month and a percentage of the sale. And they try and beat you with their amazon prices.. They are worse than ebay for the conflict of interest for just that reason. When you list it tells you what your price is compared to others.. and amazon has the lowest if they can help it

 

[kdtjb]

I don't sell anything on Ebay. My complaint is, when I'm looking for parts for my 64 Fury, I have to look at fuzzy dice, dead man steering knobs, and all kinds of parts that have nothing to do with what I'm looking for. For instance,. You could put a pile of poop in and just say fits 64 Fury and they will put it on! I't gotten very annoying searching for parts there any more.

I found that if you click the "used" button you get it down to 20 -25 pages. But way to much crap we could care less about still.

 

[Budnicks]

I think E-Scam was a great place before, all the businesses got on there & drove the prices way up, to the masses of individual private sellers, that pretty much got them to the massive on line business, were they are now, IMHO it's a supply & demand issue now, now they know they can ask for more fees from the individual private sellers, because so many people/businesses depend on it now, they are still kind of the only real game in town, it use to be a great place to sell a few items to the masses, for a small acceptable sellers fees, now it's just another gigantic on line business web site business, gouging the little guy or part time private seller, they have veered way away from the original premise/concept they started with... That's My 2 cents, well I'm up to 4 cents now...

 

[YY1]

I think E-Scam was a great place before, all the businesses got on there & drove the prices way up, to the masses of individual private sellers, that pretty much got them to the massive on line business, were they are now, IMHO it's a supply & demand issue now, now they know they can ask for more fees from the individual private sellers, because so many people/businesses depend on it now, they are still kind of the only real game in town, it use to be a great place to sell a few items to the masses, for a small acceptable sellers fees, now it's just another gigantic on line business web site business, gouging the little guy or part time private seller, they have veered way away from the original premise/concept they started with... That's My 2 cents, well I'm up to 4 cents now...

Agree

While we're discussing ebay...

How come people list an item starting at $9.99 (sometimes multiple times), and when it gets NO BIDS, they relist it as "buy it now" for $12.99?

If you didn't want it for 6 months at $10, are you gonna all of a sudden want it at $13??

I tried gomotorbids, which was supposed to be specifically for auto/boat, etc stuff.
Was VERY difficult to search, few poorly organized categories, with few items, and most items were from a handfull of sellers, most of which were either obviously "loss leaders" or over retail start prices.
I think they went bust because "gomotorbids" is now an ebay volume seller.

...wait, I just looked at ebid...it actually looks pretty cool.
maybe too similar to ebay though. bet they get a "cease and desist" suit soon.

Alright, it was the boobies that got my attention!

 

[bigmanjbmopar]

I just sold some stuff on craigslist used my special tool and also used Paypal for invoicing and shipping and guess what?

NO HOLD ON MY MONEY FROM PAYPAL!! MUHAHAHAHAH lol sorry got excited. Paypal did take a small percentage but $.70 on a $14 sell I can except.

I had the ad up for less than 24 hours too eat that Eripoff!

 

[Hemirunner]

I suspect the letter will accomplish nothing but making you feel better - if it actually gets to a human. I agree their fees have gotten outrageous in the past few years, but the only thing that will get their attention is a significant drop in business. It has gotten to the point that there are less and less "individuals" who sell there. Most everything is being sold by Ebay Companies or other online "companies" that have marked up their items to cover the fees and apparently make it work some how. There are no true "deals" to be had on Ebay anymore. They really need some serious competition!!

This pretty much says it all from my viewpoint. I rarely find any deals on there anymore and really dislike "sifting" through all the New Parts to find a real deal on a used one. They should start another site exclusively for new items (that I would never have to visit!) so that I could look at just the used gems!

 

['69Net]

You Guy's are spoilt rotten with Petrol prices.......come on down Here and pay what We pay for **** asian fuel.............