Why I Stopped Selling On Ebay

Ebay has a mind boggling system of endless fees. It's so complex, I won't even try to explain it all.

To put the fee schedule into a very general sense....

-You pay 10% of whatever the item sold for
-You also pay 10% of whatever it costs to ship the item
-You also pay 2.9% of whatever the item sold for as a Paypal fee
-You also pay 2.9% of whatever the item costs to ship as a Paypal fee

Now there's a myriad of other nickel and dime fees, but let's just stop here.

Let's pretend you list your old boom box radio on eBay. Let's say it sells for $40.00...yay!
Okay so eBay skims $4.00 off it, not bad right? Ahhh...
So your boom box is pretty heavy so it costs $30.00 just for the postage, so eBay skims $3.00 off that. Oh and then they skim the Paypal fee off your item value plus the postage, that's another $2.10.

So you ended up paying $9.10 in fees to eBay for an item which netted you $40.00.....Holy crap! That's 25%! ........And I didn't even factor in the little nickel and dime extra fees you'll probably encounter.

Okay, so you're paying 25% commission to sell on a venue where you do all the work. You have to write the listing, take the photos, then package the item and drive it to the Post Office.
And it is a lot of work, I've done it. You could easily spend 2 or 3 hours of your time listing then packaging this boom box.

So maybe you're saying, "But eBay has the most traffic and I'll get top dollar for my item".....Uhm, unfortunately no.
I started selling on eBay in 2001. Back then, eBay did have tons of traffic. You could list the most common, mundane item and it would get over 100 views. Now the same item would get maybe one view and it's probably from you looking at it.

The traffic on eBay has declined dramatically in the last 8 years. There are hardly any actual auction listings. This was a big part of the appeal for eBay, auctions were fun to watch and bid on. Now it's mostly all set sale listings.

The final nail in the coffin for me was putting ads on your listing directing people to buy the exact same item from someone else! Great concept... no thanks.