by Emese Tuza

Created on: February 18, 2009

I am an old-timer with eBay, having been a member since 1999 and a seller since 2001. Over the years, I have learned a lot and grew up with eBay. I remember the first few years when I was keeping track of sales in a spreadsheet to this year, when I have an online shop and an easy way to generate templates for my transactions and keep track of money coming in and items going out. I have, for the most part enjoyed my experiences, my favorite being when I match a buyer to a perfect product I was selling. Receiving emails of praises from happy buyers is certainly the best part of the experience.

However, due to many scams and identity theft attempts, eBay has tightened the belts. Since they do not want to scare away buyers, the company takes it out on the sellers. I have become more and more frustrated with the never-ending compliance issues, huge fees and policies forced on us sellers that simply don't make sense. For example, the "new and updated" feedback policy, according to which, sellers are no longer able to leave negative or even neutral feedback for buyers. To me, this is eBay anarchy. Without being able to alert other sellers to buyers who don't pay, don't follow through, or are unreasonable to work with, sellers are left to their own devices to find out these things the hard way. Buyers, or course, are still able to leave negative feedback and they do so with reckless abandon. Without the fear of receiving a bad feedback, buyers have become increasingly hard to deal with. A lot of them don't pay, pay late, leave retelitory feedback for honest, hard-working sellers.

Another unreasonable example is the policy that sellers are not able to accept anything but Paypal as a form of payment. It is not a big surprise to find out that eBay owns Paypal, and by banishing other payment forms drives more business to a subsidiary. Former customers who used to pay with checks or with money orders are no longer able to do so. Paypal also means another set of large fees the sellers are stuck with.

A lot of buyers are not aware of all the fees sellers pay. First, there's a listing fee, which is based on the item's starting price. This fee is payable regardless of the item selling or not selling. At the time of listing, other optional fees can also be added, such as a subtitle, numerous photos, pretty borders, etc, all fees that add up but are almost necessary to have a listing stand out. If the item sells, a Final Value Fee is assessed, based on the selling price. When the buyer pays, Paypal also takes a cut, then the Post Office takes a cut, all-in-all, fees can add up to 15-20% of the total sales price.

As mentioned above, I have been selling for several years, and though I'm just a small fish in the pond, I have made good pocket money every month. With the new policies and enormous fees, I am not sure how much longer I would be able to continue my sales side job on eBay.

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