I have a note about fees in 1999 which is eyeopening.
Listing fees were based on opening bid (no Fixed Price).
Started at 25cents US and rose to $2.00.
Experienced sellers had to tell newbies to list at $9.99 not $10.00 because listing fees went up there.
Free Listings were very rare.
Pictures were 25 cents each, but were not yet mandatory.
I suppose eBay was making its money on listing fees in those days.
Final Value Fees were 5% to 7.5% although I don't recall what attracted the higher rate.
And there were a lot of buyer complaints about shipping rip-offs from sellers who sold at $1.00 but had $10.00 to $100.00 shipping fees (which did not come under FVFs).
Canadian sellers got a lot of this because our normal shipping rates had to be higher than our US competitors.
I was delighted when BillPay became available. Getting cash in the mail was a minor hassle. I had to open a US dollar account. I did have a few personal cheques bounce, usually from US buyers, which meant I had to be cautious about shipping.
And US buyers all too often sent Domestic Postal Money Orders that could not be cashed or deposited* in Canada.
And then Western Union simplified online payments by sending emails to sellers as soon as the buyer bought a money order and we could ship immediately knowing that the money order was on its way.
That lasted for a good six months before the phoney emails started.
BillPay was much more reliable. EBay fairly soon switched over to Paypal rather than continue to run their own private system.
And bought PP in 2002.
I don't think things are better or worse.
Just different.
*We slipped them into our company bank deposits, since we always did a fair bit of business in US dollars. Sneaky but the bank accepted them that way as long as we used the night deposit bag and not the commercial tellers who paid attention.
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