Today’s rant focuses on the pricing structure at eBay
Just tried my to sell the first thing on eBay and the pricing structure is horrendous.
Between the eBay listing/auction service and the PayPal payment service, they end up eating anywhere from 5 to 15% of the sale price. And thats only for simple things like a Dell Axim (interested anyone?)
As you move into eBay motors and real estate, the pricing gets really silly. I mean, ppl, you are almost charging B&M (Brick&Mortar, i.e. Real/Local store) prices here. Whats with that!
Total for an item I expected to sell for around $200 =
2.40 (insertion fee for item reserved btwn $50 to $199.99)
+ 1.31 (5.25% of first $25 of final value)
+ 4.81 (2.75% from $25.01 to $1000 of final value)
= 8.25
Did I forget to mention, this is for a vanilla auction, no featured listing, no boldface text, no BuyItNow.
And now here is what PayPal cuts off from the $191.75 I actually get; Oh Wait! They charge you on the $200 =
.30 (initial fee for standard account, incoming auction cash)
+ 5.80 (2.9% of money you get)
= 6.10
So on a $200 auction, you give away
8.25
+ 6.10
= 14.35 (About 7.1% for those of you still following the math)
Now this is what I call monopolistic pricing.
Did I forget to mention, this is for a basic/vanilla/no-frills auction and the PayPal prices aren’t for you nice folks outside america (you lucky people pay more!)
Which is why, midway, during the seller setup pages, I Googled for alternatives.
However, the competition needs to work harder still. Fire eBay is a good take at this sentiment, though I think it lacks the full time technical and emotional support. Are uBid and Yahoo Auctions the only real competition?
Also, it would help Yahoo! if this did not lead to an error page and instead just redirected to their auctions home.