by Malcolm Robbins

Created on: August 08, 2010   Last Updated: August 09, 2010

eBay was once a site with low fees and a great customer base. It had the feel of a flea market where you could hunt for deals and sell rarities at a reasonable price. Nowadays it will cost you an arm and a leg in fees, fees to list your item, fees when it sells, fees to maintain your eBay store (if you decide to go down that route), and PayPal fees (which is a subsidiary of eBay). By the time you actually the money you made into your bank account it may be less then 60% of the original amount. When it comes to selling on eBay though you will be lucky if you even get that money to your bank account. With eBay's new and improved buyer protection policy, any buyer that feels like getting your item for free can and will. All it takes is them opening up a dispute with PayPal or eBay and claiming you sent them a different item than they purchased, they are then free to send you back whatever they like as long as they provide a tracking number PayPal or eBay will decide in their favor and they will be completely refunded.

Good luck selling your item in the first place though, eBay has become over saturated with fake Chinese knock-offs of everything from Mp3 players to brand name clothing. These sellers are usually power-sellers and will rank higher than you in searches and visibility because eBay does not care about authenticity just sale volume. eBay has now changed their store policy so that if you have a store the items in it now show up in the main search result, where it used to just show up in a different section. Now all the stores that are flooded with thousands of products are showing up in regular searches and it is crowding up eBay even more, making it less likely for someone to find your item when there are pages of useless spam in front of it.

The fact that you can only use PayPal to receive payments on eBay makes selling on this site an even worse experience. PayPal has been notorious in shutting down users accounts for no reason, with no explanation given. PayPal can close your account that has money on it and make you jump through hoops to get that money unlocked, unfortunately many times people either give up because of how hard it is to get their money back, or they complete all the steps and PayPal still leaves the funds lock. Scamming seems abundant within these two companies, so if you plan on selling on eBay using PayPal be careful, and never leave all your funds in your PayPal account.

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