ebay paypal costs combo, make small items sales pointless.

Ok lets get this straight, on under items that sell for under £10 ebay and paypal make way to high a percentage benefit, on an item that sells for say
£5.98 inc £1.99 postage such as a dvd i sold recently :
The packaging and postage cost not being loaded is £1.99
that leaves £3.99
————————————-
final value fee will be 8.75%, and arent calculated inc postage cost
so that leaves £3.64p
————————————-
the listing fee for a dvd is 10p
so that leaves £3.54
————————————-
the paypal charge to receive the total £5.98 payment is 40p
so that leaves £3.14
————————————-
so for selling a dvd on ebay for £5.98 inc postage
————————————-
I make £3.14 or 53% of the price
post office make £1.99 or 33% of the price
ebay make £0.85p or 14% of the price
————————————-
if you discount the postage part of the equation and view ebays share as costs subtracted from the actual sale price not including postage it works out as ebay receiving 21% commission on this sale of £3.99.

so really ebay for items around the fiver value is receiving 21% commission, now they may claim that paypal is a seperate entity blah blah etc and cant be lumped together with ebay, but really its all part of the process. I cant understand the post offices costs to some extent although they have risen over the years pushing small sales on ebay further away again from selling small items on ebay. The post office at least have to physically deliver something to someones door. All of ebays costs are mainly electronic ? and therefore the high percentage they take along the chain seems unnecessary, surely there is an opportunity here for someone to do the job cheaper than this the final value itself seems an exorbitant percentage on small items. and from my purchasers view postage is just another part of the total price, so I cant really not include that in my costs.

overall the costs involved in selling small items means, that you cant really justify selling items under a tenner not including your own costs listing and under £20.00-£30.00 including your own time costs of listing packaging and posting the item.

Which basically means the second hand selling on ebay which one of the best ways of green recycling for many items is not viable unless >

1. you dont count your own time costs in the equation.
2. the items your selling are at least over £20.00 in value

if postage and ebay/paypal costs were lower it would make this kind of selling more viable for the average person. As it is the average person is financially better off working an extra hour and throwing the item away or giving it to a charity shop.

BBC iplayer 2 ? suffering interface overload and feature-itis.

BBC iplayer 2 interface

see what your looking to get at ? way too many bright points drawing and confusing the eye, who could not tell that, when they were testing this, that it was way to busy ? Mixing in radio confuses the issue especially by giving radio tag pictures that make it look like video content apart fom an icon which doesnt draw the eye, preferences about tv / radio should quite obviously be remembered between session visits, Whichever way, it now takes me about three times longer to find and watch what i want with this interface. And the way the structural titles are dimmer than everything else ? greyed out just wrong, By why give advice when your not paid to consult, and some other egit is probably making a good living out of ballsing it up.

Snow Leopard

It looks like Apple may have read my mind, the upcoming release of Mac os X called “Snow Leopard” seems to be all about speed improvements.

Nice snow leopard no bitey!

And hopefully this will also be the release in which all of the numerous tiny little niggles and bugs will finally be resolved and ironed out, so the operating system feels smoother and slicker.

And heres a gratuitous picture for the sake of it, of a snow leopard just because theyre scrummy.

Heres a thought, Perhaps Also … Apple could donate £10.00 of the 10.6 operating system upgrade purchase price we would all pay, toward a foundation that preserves the habitat of the snow leopard ?

The web and price comparison

why oh why do people list cheap prices and never include postage on that so you have to investigate delivery costs ? All web business’s have to deliver their product, as such all web prices should include a delivery price as standard and default in the prices.

I think im gonna come up with in an icon that means inc vat inc delivery in the uk.

Lifestyle and stock imagery

Dont you hate lifestyle and stock imagery with a vengeance ? I know I do, Overuse…in fact any use of it, makes me want to vomit, but people just cant help themselves can they, all those imperfection free skins and white toothy smiles inside neat sweaters, filemakers website uses way too much of them, and the voiceover video guy jeesh just makes you want to leap out of your seat and throttle the company, homer v bart style, preferably with some noticeable off floor levitated choking.

filemaker website :

Though apple themselves have been the ultimate sinners … ? … wait a minute … filemaker is apple now ! Oh darn that explains it. I think apple took that benetton version of the world and really ran with it, except perhaps they polished it even shinier still, to be honest i cant stand image visualisations of the customer which were supposed to self identify with:

find yourself in this lot :
its a benneton style marketing life for me

Im a fake mountain bike shop owner

Quark v Indesign

Id say quark might win this one still indesign is bloated and has a terrible interface complexity issues and is buggy, I use to get my more dtp pages produced in a shorter period of time in Quark 3.5 as a freelancer then i have in any of the later incarnations of either quark or indesign. Indesign has only got worse in my opinion since its awkward birth, the reason why people left quark for indesign in the first place was only because it was buggy as hell in mac os x and needed a rewrite, the interface if it had worked properly was still the best. And recently working for a client it screwed a load of CS2 document master pages up when the CS2 documents were brought in to CS3.

Re-evaluate

When things descend into the canon of indoctrinated greatness, they must surely be freshly re-evaluated and qualified over time, otherwise we end up teaching things in text books in a wrote fashion that are never re-evaluated, all things are in flux, and it tires me to see people repeating the opinions of others or books without qualifying them themselves. The great canon of literary works is like this just taught wrote fashion and each person learns the dogma and indoctrinates someone else with it, noise transference.

Royal car runs off excess Wine ?

check this story on CNN :

Its exactly what you comically expect from rich people. He can afford to run his car of a green fuel generated from excess wine production, and inform his staff they need to lower their carbon footprint so his accounts look like hes doing good as a green ambassador. Its all well and good to make your conscious feel good by running your car on green fuels when your that rich, what does he think hes setting an example we can all follow ? lol money makes all possible, if your truly poor pensioner you buy battery eggs, not because you dont understand the issues, but because its all that can be afforded. Wierd thing also in that article i didnt realise that the EU was setting a limit to UK wine production ? meaning there is waste after that limit ? Why do they attempt to control the amount produced ? im sure the french gets some huge allocation in comparison ? didnt realise Eu was controlling this but hey I they seem legislate on such banal stuff.