Listing items on ebay is a great way to clean out the garage. But once you pay the 12% commission on the item, the commission on the postage, the PayPal fee, the listing fee, kiss about 50% of your revenue good bye. So as long as you know this ahead of time then you mark the item 50% higher in price right? Well except for the fact that most ebay shoppers are cheap and are looking for a “freebie” from novice sellers. Real stores and businesses almost never use the auction style listings and if they do they know these are low cost leaders and that they won’t make a dime but just drive traffic to their stores.
Here is why I am really mad at ebay;
I am an ebay power seller. My ebay id is islandgirl7215. Ebay has the worst customer service of any company I have ever worked with in my lifetime. They billed my account $315 in unauthorized charges on November 14th and refuse to get it credited back to me. A friend of mine ran 1.8million dollars in sales through their site and they told him he owed an extra $5,000 in fees that no one could account for. He didn’t pay it and closed his account. If you are an online seller I would recommend Amazon, shopify, etsy, and many other online store sites versus using the tried and true ebay method. While ebay does have a good customer base their customer service is terrible. It seems that they only employee foreign people that cannot speak proper English. This exacerbates the bad customer service that they already have.
Buyers have 100% protection and sellers have no protection. If a buyer says they don’t like something for whatever reason they get their money back from ebay and the seller gets a chargeback. The buyer can order til their hearts delight and never have to pay for anything and never mail any of the items back to the seller. They can threaten you with a bad feedback score day in and day out. Ebay says that this is against policy but it still happens. Many people feel like ebay is too big to fail and that may be the case. They have bought out skype, 25% of Craigs list and many other companies with all the cash that they have lying around. But eventually when you have repeated customer service problems and your customers are not even really allowed to contact you, you will become obsolete.