It seems like fleabay always find ways to make it harder for sellers to sell.  First they “lower” the price for listing.  That can’t be bad right?  Wrong.  What ebay did was raise the final commission rate.  Before the change, the rate was about 5.5% of the final value.  With the change, it’s nearly close to 10%.  For example, if you sold a $100 item, with the old pricing you’d be paying around $7 (let’s say $1.50 for listing & $5.50 for commission).  With the new structure you’d pay more than $11 ($.75 listing, $9.50). 

Now, for the month of October, Ebay added another rule that will make sellers even more furious: limiting the shipping charges.  It’d be okay if I didn’t lose money over it but their rates doesn’t even make sense.  I finally put up the most overrated game of the year, GTA 4 on Ebay and I was going to charge $5.50 for shipping and handling (This is after putting it up on Craigslist for about two weeks and getting calls from little kids wanting to trade.)  Usually the shipping rate from USPS is about $5.15, with the time I spend taping  the package up and going to the post office, that’s probably worth the extra 35 cents I charge.  So what am I bitching about if I only lose 35 cents?  It’s because the highest rate I can put up for a videogame is $4.00.  If I put a shipping rate of $5, fleabay tells me the shipping rate is too high and I can’t list the item.  Now I lose more than a dollar for every transaction just on shipping.  Ebay has this strict rule on Half.com but that’s fine because that’s a listing site, not an auction site.  You can already tell how much you’ll be making with Half.com.  With Ebay, you don’t know how much your item will go for and you’re taking a risk. 

The reason most sellers charged extra for shipping was to offset the expensive fees tacked on earlier this year.  If they didn’t raise the final commission rate, the sellers would have no problem charging the actual shipping rate.  But in the end, the seller pays for it since ebay want the buyers to be happy and therefore have more business.  Maybe they forgot, that without the sellers, there’d be no buyers.  This was the first time I’ve sold on Ebay in months because of the fees but sometimes you have no choice when little kids from craigslist bug you all the time.  It’s time for a new auction site to emerge so Ebay can stop screwing the sellers. 

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