AuctionCut

Anyone else feel like ebay is "double-dipping" on us sellers with the Paypal fees? Personally, i think they should offer discounted Paypal fees to ebay sellers since they are already making good coin off of us!

Cluviou4u wrote:The fees are getting bigger, feedback policies are getting worse and whats good in it? Well, you have to be smart these days to keep selling online. There is many ways to do it. The main reason why people are still using eBay is a high quality traffic, but its gona change soon as there is strong rivals growing more powerful each and every day.
Personally I like the idea, to grabb your buyer, take him into your own professional webpage and make him constantly buy from you.
eBay allows to put links which provides more information on product. Its a loophole and you can abuse it in many ways.

Fantastic piece of advice. eBay should really be the way to grab new customers. impress them with your professionalism and customer service and stellar products, and then have them purchase from your web site where you have no listing fees.

In regards to the fees, you have think of eBay as providing a premium service, and as such you will end up paying a premium price. I personally think that if some people spent as much time researching creative ways to improve their business model (like Cluviou4u's idea)as they do on bitching and moaning about eBay fees, then their bottom line would probably be doing a lot better.

Cluviou4u wrote:The fees are getting bigger, feedback policies are getting worse and whats good in it? Well, you have to be smart these days to keep selling online. There is many ways to do it. The main reason why people are still using eBay is a high quality traffic, but its gona change soon as there is strong rivals growing more powerful each and every day.
Personally I like the idea, to grabb your buyer, take him into your own professional webpage and make him constantly buy from you.
eBay allows to put links which provides more information on product. Its a loophole and you can abuse it in many ways.

The theory itself is good, but many buyers use Ebay over other auctions for the single reason it is trusted and appears to have a good reputation.

If like Us you believe that it is getting way to expensive to trade on place's like E-Bay etc and that they impose to many restrictions against Trading and swapping online, then you would probably like to do something to stop them.
Given the size and wealth of these companies it is unlikely we can stop them all together! But we can give them a run for their money and make them think about reducing their charges.

I have started savef1.co.uk and swappa-shoppa.co.uk

They both lead to save f1 as do many other sites lol, and I hope to have you join us there.
At the moment we don’t have that many members but it is growing every day and every single person that joins helps to make it that much better.
I am asking to not only to join but also to add it as your home page for a while as it will help us with Google to get higher up the rankings.
Also if you believe as we do that this FREE site is worth promoting then please email the people you do business with and your friends and colleagues and tell them all about us.
We look forward to seeing you there soon.

Cross selling, up selling, recurring sales. Don't look at it from the perspective of one sale. You need to look at the lifetime value of the customer. If you sell something people will buy more of or similar products after the initial sale, the fees turn into peanuts.

For example, lets say I'm selling digital cameras and I have a low profit margin and the fees are starting to kill me, what are my options?

1. Raise the price, lose customers.
2. Find the same thing somewhere else cheaper
3. Add additional products to my product line, when someone buys a camera they also get an email followup with links to your other products, camera accessories, upgrades, batteries, bags.

The best, in my opinion, if you have a product you can create a how to manual for it (ex: you sell digital cameras, you have an info product that's downloadable that shows them how to take amazing pictures). Then it's 100% profit. Heck you can even find one of the millions of products out there that pay commission and push that.

You have the name and mailing address, you can do a lot of followup.

eBay let down its guard an let every kid on the block start selling. To make up for lost profits they are raising fees and trying to reshape their image.

You have to make Ebay work for you. The fees are unjustifiable and ebay is no longer a cheap place to sell. You can still make it work though. I use ebay to get people to my website. I have a shop on ebay. I list my items ensuring I achieve my desired margin after including ebay and paypal fees and when someone buys from me I send them thank you letters and my website address with a new customer offer, usually 10% off the first purchase.

I look at ebay as advertising. It's much better than throwing your money away on adverts that may or may not work. Ebay work and you make a profit every time someone buys from your shop. It's then up to you to market to the customer.

You can also direct market to the customer through the post with a flyer or special offer. The first thing you need to do though is get the customer and ebay is a great place to throw your net out. Forget about the fees they're a part of the game. I never, ever sell below my desired profit margin. If this takes the price of my products high then so what, they're high, you don't have to buy them.
There's no point complaining about ebay fees. At this moment it's the only online auction site with the kind of traffic that sellers want. Ebay know this and they're wringing every penny from this monopoly. I can't wait for an alternative to come along. But get serious, at the moment there isn't one.

Amazon’s growth is better but margin is not stable. 2% net is not good business. So, I myself like Ebay more.

Jeff wrote:I was wondering if anyone had any input at all on the seller fees from ebay. I had all my prices for ebaystore items adjusted perfectly so I knew my profit after all the crazy fees they charge. Now they have raised the perctanges again, and now my profits on hundreds of items must be changed. Thats f***ed up. It used to be 10% for store items, now its 12%. So if I sell a item for $24.95, I pay ebay $2.99 to sell that item. After paying paypal as well, you might as well not even sell the item if your only making a few bucks.

My question is, Is there better fees available for sellers who do thousands a month with great feedback. (I do about $15,000 and feedback is 99.9%)

And is amazon better that ebay, seriously thinking about moving to amazon over ebay.

Hi Jeff,

To be honest i have no sales expierience with Amazon, however i do know there are no upfront listing fees, you simply pay them a percentage in the after sale, but the beauty of this is you cannot lose because you only pay Amazon a fee when you have sold your item/s creating profits after the fees, to me thats a no brainer!

Good point raised there Jeff....John.

Sadly, I don't think Mr. Donahoe will be replaced any time soon... He may seem quite greedy to us with all the policies and programs he has for eBay, the board of directors does seem to see things the way we do. In fact, he was awarded a US$1.57 Million equity bonus for his performance in 2009, along with a few other top executives.

For exact figures, have a read: http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/bl ... 25716.html

Cheers!

salehoo wrote:Sadly, I don't think Mr. Donahoe will be replaced any time soon... He may seem quite greedy to us with all the policies and programs he has for eBay, the board of directors does seem to see things the way we do. In fact, he was awarded a US$1.57 Million equity bonus for his performance in 2009, along with a few other top executives.

For exact figures, have a read: http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/bl ... 25716.html

Cheers!

Seems to me mr donahue, got the old engine tuned, he gets the kind of money as a bonus that most powersellers will never see, go figure, the world of admin it sinks with greed?

John.

IF I HAVE AN ITEM THAT I KNOW IS WORTH AT LEAST $150.00, IS THERE ANYTHING WRONG WITH STARTING THE ITEM AT $.01 WITH A $100.00 SHIPPING FEE? IT WILL MAKE THE FINAL VALUE FEES BE MUCH LESS, SINCE THE FVF IS CHARGED ON THE SELLING PRICE ONLY. IF I DO SO AND DESCRIBE THE REASONING FOR DOING SO IN THE DESCRIPTION OF THE PRODUCT, CAN EBAY TAKE ANY ACTION AGAINST ME? IF WE CAN TELL THE POTENTIAL BUYER UP FRONT THE REASONING BEHIND THE SHIPPING COST BEING LISTED SO HIGH, I THINK MOST PEOPLE WILL UNDERSTAND THAT THE GRAND TOTAL COST OF THE SHIPPING + THEIR WINNING BID WOULD BE THE SAME ON AN ITEM THAT SELLS FOR $100.00 WITH A $5.00 SHIPPING FEE, AND AN ITEM THAT SELLS FOR $5.00 WITH A $100.00 SHIPPING FEE.

Hi Thomas,

The trouble is with that one is eBay will hit you hard on the postal policies they are strict on, and it will affect your DSR which you must uphold, or you can be banned from using eBay altogether as a seller, the only thing to do is research the markets find HOT sellers, and sell them they will mostly sell, compounding out the loss of profits to fees, and that way you can keep your postal charges honest and to the actual cost of postage!

Some people will not take kindly to being told you are charging way over the odds on the postage, with a starting bid of $0.01, it will put people off, although i can see your point on the fees!

John AKA Ed.

decca234uk wrote:You have to make Ebay work for you. The fees are unjustifiable and ebay is no longer a cheap place to sell. You can still make it work though. I use ebay to get people to my website. I have a shop on ebay. I list my items ensuring I achieve my desired margin after including ebay and paypal fees and when someone buys from me I send them thank you letters and my website address with a new customer offer, usually 10% off the first purchase.

I look at ebay as advertising. It's much better than throwing your money away on adverts that may or may not work. Ebay work and you make a profit every time someone buys from your shop. It's then up to you to market to the customer.

You can also direct market to the customer through the post with a flyer or special offer. The first thing you need to do though is get the customer and ebay is a great place to throw your net out. Forget about the fees they're a part of the game. I never, ever sell below my desired profit margin. If this takes the price of my products high then so what, they're high, you don't have to buy them.
There's no point complaining about ebay fees. At this moment it's the only online auction site with the kind of traffic that sellers want. Ebay know this and they're wringing every penny from this monopoly. I can't wait for an alternative to come along. But get serious, at the moment there isn't one.

I totally agree with you on this concept of using eBay as an advertising funnel to your website, when done right that first time customer from your eBay shop will go straight to your website there after for the better deal and no fees to you, it absolutely works for any market you sell in providing of course the market is in a supply and demand situation?

Good post....John AKA Ed.

Exactly! With the traffic that flocks to eBay, there is no better place to go to for product exposure. Just maintain a few listings on eBay to drive traffic to your own website or listings outside of eBay.

Or you could try other venues, those that require lesser fees to get your items listed and sold. Check out one of our recent blogs: http://www.salehoo.com/blog/need-more-buyers

Cheers!