Ebay! New Fees that they are hidding. Ways to keep the new fees lower!

I am not sure if anyone has checked the billing lately that ebay has been sending out. There seems to be a new charge that they are wacking international sellers...

Final Value Fee on Shipping... Well well.... Look at this here, gotta love these people!

Let me get into some of the scenarios that I have looked over. You will just love them....

Forget the new listing for free blah blah blah, if you sell outside of Australia, your going to get wacked one way or another.

On Ebay.com, you can list 50 free listings a month... Beauty! Then once a month, they have .01 cent listing days.... Another score...

Look at my invoice... WTF!

See, Ebay is so trying to squeeze out more money, they have now taxed shipping. I just got off the phone with ebay, and they can not tell me how this works. 10% of my fees for the month are shipping final value fees. It makes me laugh.

OK, let me break down a sale and then you will understand...

1 card listed at .01 cents. Kewl, save .09 cents as if you start your listing at .99 cents, you only pay .10 cents to list. They have these special days once a month on ebay US.

Sell the card for 5.00, get hit with the typical fee of 9% or .45 cents. Now we are looking at .46 invested in selling a card for 5.00 dollars.

Shipping outright..... 2.35 cents for card to America via Aus post. 1.00 for padded bag if you don't by a box of 100 at a time. Now we are at 3.35 AU. Cost of top loader and team bag if you ship with them, another .19 cents or so. Now we are looking at about 3.50 Au for shipping. Now, they take .30 for this as a Final Value Fee on shipping. HUH? Did I see that right? I just lost almost .50 cents more on my 5.00 sale of a card or .95 cents out of the 5.00 I sold it for. This will also fluctuate depending on the dollar being up or down against the Aussie dollar, and we have not even gotten involved with the PayPal fees.

SO, with PayPal fees, I am now out 1.50 or so out of a 5.00 card sale. Or ruffly 40% of the sale price.

Now, I chatted with some spark on the phone at ebay, which was out of the Manilla. She told me that if I were to add my shipping fees into cost of what I was selling, I would not pay this fee? HUH? Free shipping she said, add the fee to your sell it now price. HUH AGAIN? I asked her then if I do that, I still pay 9% of the final sale price, she said YES. By darn, I am still paying a bloody shipping fee.

So, I sell a card for 8.50USD. Pay 9% of 8.50. Now, yes, I can see where this might be a little cheaper then the price model above, but your still paying a shipping tax with out the PayPal fees. However, when you add those in, your still paying about the same.

This is how Ebay has been dodgy. The fees went into effect and if you read the page (which is no longer up on ebay, its been removed) that tells you how these prices come about, it went into saying it was trying to keep the shipping fair and not letting people make money off of it and if they were going to, they were going to take the profit so to speak.

Listen, I have a ton of stuff to sell, I have looked at my other options and really, this is still the best for what I am trying to thin out of a massive and dumb collection. However, I feel that you should be warned about this SCAM that they are pulling. They give with one hand and take with another and so on and so on.

Dodgy claw backs through paypal is not even half the problem, its EBAY and its SCUM.

IF you are going to sell on ebay, one way to save is to put up massive amounts of cards at once and hope you get someone who wins multi auctions at once. I found that I save this way in fees. If you play it smart, you can list 80 auctions a month for free, just make sure they are going to sell. Forget the re-listing aspects of it if its free unless you are putting the card up in on Ebay.com. Ebay.AU is just rude.

Look for the .01 cent listing days on ebay US. When you see them come up, make sure its at least mid nite in California before you list. 15 or so hour difference from Perth. You might also make a thread if no one else has about the .01 cent listings. Would be good for all of us to know about it. I use turbo lister and have this puppy loaded for this .01 cent days to sell my cards that I know I will have issues with getting .99 cents for.

Do one listing, make sure that it says .01 cents. If it says .10 cents or more, then its the wrong time to list.

Set your shipping for whatever, really, I have no idea how this crap works. Go for broke and bobs your uncle, or at least that is the saying isnt it!

This will keep your ebay fees to a minimum. The shipping fee does not apply to any items on ebay.au. Give it time though, it will. And just so you have an idea, I find my sales (not dollars) 250% higher on Ebay.com then on Ebay.AU.. So much for them fixing the cross listing between sites.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to leave comments or other short cuts to get around fees on FEEBAY!

Excellent write up Michael! Well, I'm going to use a different angle to approach on how to lower your selling cost.

I think by now my love and hate relationship with Ebay has been pretty well-documented here (at the moment, it is pretty much hate hate hate Ebay). I have been a re-seller long before the days of Ebay, going to card conventions around the world (mainly Asia for me) acquiring rare cards and turning them around for a tidy sum of profit. Of course, when Ebay came, there goes our "livelihood" and became evident that reselling cards especially at a lower price range became not profitable. Many of us re-sellers together with card shops around the world "perished". It became distinct that there are 2 pricing markets, one for high-end (>$1000, amount debateable but you get my drift) and one for mid-end and low-end. Reputable re-sellers for high-end continue to survive till today but their mark-ups are pretty hefty ranging from 5% to 35% depending on the card itself. Lucky for me, I have remained in contact of some re-sellers and I personally still use them when selling cards more than $1000. I have no problems paying their high fee because they can get a price of which I could never obtained and in many instances even higher than Ebay, with very little corrective recourse action back to you.

That then leaves you with your mid-end and low-end cards of which few re-sellers will want to touch them. I used to use Ebay for them and for many years, a $5 sale on Ebay would have cost me between $0.70 to $0.90 depending on how you structure your sales, ie through normal sales auction or store set-up. That went well for many years, to most probably till 2008 or 09 where sellers were hit with extra fees here and there and a $5 sale today like what you say would cost about $1.50 or more. On top of that, postage over the years have gone by at least 25% which makes buyers of low-end cards even more picky because they have to pay for the postage. Now that Ebay is going to tax you for the postage charge means you are going to charge even more which makes low-end cards even less attractive. Ebay is not dumb, they know that there is no money to be made via low-valued transactions and hence applied fee creeps on sellers. Well, it is a good exercise for them to weed out these kind of transactions. That is where I made deliberate effort to stay away from Ebay on low-end cards. That is where forums like OCT comes in handy. Personally, I would have preferred to give away the cards here and help another collector, or may be at least charge postage so that I am not out of pocket. I am stuck in the same situation as you are and am desperate to thin out my collection as well, but I am not about to pay Ebay a ridiculous amount just to thin it out.

As much as I hate Ebay, it is still a good option to sell mid-end cards there, especially player PC collectors which are not forums or in other forums that you do not participate in. Selling a $100 would have cost you about $10 in fee which in the scheme of things is still a lot but at least you still can get some money back for your cards. Fully agree that .com site is much better then .com.au as you might get better selling value from them. But again, higher selling value (especially international sales) means higher risk with the Ebay move of shifting protection from sellers to buyers. So I might stick to Ebay for mid-end cards.

One rule on Ebay.... NEVER NEVER sell your high-end cards here. You can get rob blind here.

So I might not have answered your question directly or added value directly but just like to give an alternative perspective. Cheers Alex

You think when people or a company make millions and millions (billions?) of dollars over years of owning the market that they might reduce fees or give something back to loyal customers? na. Just bleed them dry on fees and screw them over with poor protection online. good work

Anakinleo...

You have nailed it right on the head. I was also one of those sellers with a store and such until such time as 2008-09 when they raised their fees. I closed my store the day there NEW store pricing went into effect. I also know that even with a store, you needed to have patience to sell.

I still have patience and will continue to have such even with the fees the corporate hogs are charging. One thing I found about card buyers is the trends of what they are buying. I really don't want any sales going over 10.00 as if they do, its too much of a bother with claw backs from customers who say they didnt get what was this or that or never shows.

I might work a little harder, however this teaches you to work smarter. I promised myself that I would never ever get back into selling on ebay, but I find it more relaxing then completing trades on the board for lower ended cards.

Hope my little hints can help you get a better results and added coin for future box or card buys.