15% for a real auction house that has massive overheads in comparison to ebays small bit of digital data flying around in a computer network that shows how efficient and competetive real auction houses are that they are only 5% more expensive than a virtual auction house like ebay, bear in mind by the time you total up all ebays other scalling listing fees and paypal fees and tax and payment charge they are making on your postage costs they are actually taking more than a physical auction house would take percentage wise as a proportion on low cost items ? the point is sadly “if computers cant do what the real physical world does at around at a tenth the cost” then there is profiteering going on, ebay have shareholders to feed who seem obsessed with the rapid growth of their investments as though ebay were google or something, and this is the issue. these price increases are there to satisfy their appetites, and can and will be gotten away with while there is no decent competition to ebay. also ebays action portray, that though they grew on people selling second hand posessions from their homes, they now seem desperate to move away from the low cost item crowd into more amazon retail type circles, not realising what ebays niche is, ebay having very little competition is a bad situation, but its not there fault, google has the skill and ability to do an open source ebay type thing at a tenth the cost if not free, the reason why amazon charge more and get away with it, is because the site is mainly used by shop retail channels and there used to much higher overheads in running physical shops therefore amazon looks reasonable to them. from a costs perspective ebay have the easy part of the arrangement, you the seller do all the physical donkey work to make the sales happen, ebay distribute a small amount of digital data thats it. Truth is digital retail should ultimately cost pence per item to sell ? shipping is always going to have a high cost due to its physical nature, sending and receiving money digitally should also cost pence per transaction not a percentage ? the fact that this is not the case is because ebay has blown up into a non nimble large shareholder corporate with all its associated costs, and this makes it bad value for money. strangely their attitude toward their customer is not yet affecting their profits ? proving they can get away with it ? look at the number of paypal accounts listed (ok its not an active total which is more important) but when you have 260 million estimated payal users lets say how much money do you think paypal has sitting at its disposal ? they have the GDP of a smallish country im sure, they probably dont care what anyone thinks as theyre richer than nero, the individual can be discarded at a whim with no loss to that total. This is why your complaint is never heard. Juggernauts like this take years to turn aroud or hear anything. If you can live without ebays exposure to sell your item then ebid will suffice ? but is it going to sell on ebid ? probably not, because sady critical mass and audience are the things that will make your item sell, that is ebays strength.
ebay fee increases and how and why they will get away with it.
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