Wall Street Journal: Major Gripes Of Ebay Sellers

[tea_past_times]

WSJ: Four Big Gripes of eBay Sellers

Some eBay sellers aren’t happy campers these days — so much that some are flocking to other online auction sites.

Sellers complain the site is increasingly punishing small-scale sellers while catering to larger merchants. What needs to change?

Scot Wingo offers some good insights on eBay’s biggest issues on his blog, eBay Strategies. Here are a few of the biggest eBay seller complaints, according to Mr. Wingo and other seller forums:

Seller fees. Seller fees have risen over the years, and sellers pay fees to both list items for sale and then they pay a commission on any sales made. The percentage of items selling has dropped, which makes it more likley that sellers are paying fees for unsold items.

Sellers can’t review buyers. EBay used to let both sellers and buyers leave reviews of each other based on the outcome of sales transactions. Some sellers feel the change leaves them unable to gauge a buyer’s reliability and gives buyers the ability to make demands by threatening negative comments.

Payment can take too long. To protect buyers from fraud, it can take up to three weeks for PayPal, one of the main payment methods on eBay, to deposit money in sellers’ accounts. Sellers say that hurts their cash flow.

Weak fraud protection. Some shoppers may avoid eBay due to stories of seller fraud and PayPal phishing scams. Sellers feel eBay needs to be better about ejecting fraudulent sellers and offering more and easier buyer protections.

[dipmicro]

Tea, what recped was trying to say was that you used profit+commision as a total. Central said his volume was 150k, use that for your math:

18k/150k = 12%

Does not sound so bad now, does it? Especially when you think this is combined fees for several independent services.

[tea_past_times]

And what I was trying to point out, is that of the 58k available after or above product costs, Ebay is sucking back 31% of it.

[tea_past_times]

I never said they were taking 31% of sales, I said they were taking 31% of his profit.

[tea_past_times]

31% of his P-R-O-F-I-T-S

[pierrelebel]

31% of profits is relatively low when compared to other sales methods.

The rent of a well located retail outlet usually takes 50%+ of profit; in other words as much goes to the landlord as goes to the business owner after all expenses are paid.

C'est la vie!

Even WalMart pays a huge percentage of their profit as rent.

In accounting, when calculating any type of expenses, the proper procedure is always to use percentage of sales, not profit. The only calculation made as a percentage of profit is income tax. .