I can honestly say i made alot of cash on ebay over ten years ago…
Friends used to joke around that i would have to put a banner on my house saying “bought with ebay”. Then they started changing all the rules and charging huge amounts for user fees and especially shipping charges went through the roof. It used to be so good and i love buying and selling weekly if not daily sometimes.
Sad state its in now i havent bought something in years off ebay and dont think i will.
Yeah, back 10-15 years ago ebay was a whole different place.
Instead of fearing anytime someone sent you a message you would actually get in conversations with people. Now the goal is to just make them go away without filing a claim (that they will automatically win, no matter how wrong they are) and a sense of dread falls over anyone that should happen to see a new message from a buyer in their inbox.
Not to mention the inability for low volume and low value sellers to compete. Ebay is setup so that large volume sellers that are not flat out ripping people off can stay around for years and get promoted but if a small seller has one cranky buyer open a claim it can ruin that sellers account for over a year even if the seller was 100% in the right (been there, had that happen).
The one thing I have got out of ebay the last few years is a complete loss of any and all fear of buying anything. There is zero risk to buying anything on ebay, even stuff that says no returns, broken, for parts ect are open game, no worries about coming out on the short end at all.
I hate to say it, but most sellers are from outside the US (selling into the US). That is how they can sell at reasonable prices and still have a margin even after the 20% hit from eBay fees. Just how cheaply some things can be made and shipped is amazing. For example, I purchased several give away lights (the little zoomable C5 AA/14500) for as little as $1.50 including shipping from China! They must churn those things out by the million.
Buyer beware, though. I’ve purchased, or tried to purchase at least 5 Nitecore and a couple Jetbeams from auctions. Invariably the China based seller quotes some ridiculous shipping time (up to 90 days) and provides no tracking number. If you look just at their feedback record it looks good, until you dig a little deeper and see most items previously sold were <$1 and now they are selling $75 lights for $35 (won on auction). You’ll see them disappear after a few dozen sales then are forced to wait to the day after the last possible Receive By date before filing a claim. It’s only that occasionally you really do get a screaming deal that makes the gamble worth it. You do get a refund eventually but it ties up funds for months at a time.
is it just me, or does NormanF seem kind of spammy?
He's so spammy, I don't think his post will be around much longer. 
ouch! I love spam. Cmon now, sorry if if i sound spammy.
tons of raccoons you got there.
Free shipping is actually a good marketing move. But you tend to raise the prices of item just to compensate on shipping. A lot of buyers still fall for this, but some don’t. In my opinion, it’s a good move just to get over the hassle of computing shipping fees, etc.
There are many issues with free shipping, the only positive is that stupid people think that free shipping is somehow a better deal.
When you charge for shipping (with fair rates obviously) then lots of good things come out of it for both the seller and the buyer.
First the seller can price the item at what they actually want to make off it without having to account for someone in Hawaii buying it with extreme shipping costs.
Second it encourages the buyer to buy multiple items together instead of either just buying a single item or buying multiple small orders. This works out better for all involved.
Third it gives those that live closer to the seller the appropriate shipping discount and those that live further away their appropriate shipping price. Thus everyone pays their own way instead of a socialists shipping policy where those close by cover the extra for those further away. This also puts sellers on the coats at a significant disadvantage.
Lastly it encourages buyers to pick the shipping option they desire. If they want it faster they can chose to pay more for that, if they don’t need it quickly they can save money by going with a slower option. This vastly reduces complaints about shipping time as they understand they had a choice. With “free shipping” no one ever upgrades the shipping to faster service but they still complain constantly about slow shipping.
So yeah, Free shipping sucks and is nothing more then a marketing gimmick with zero real world use other then tricking people.
No, free shipping sucks.
Ebay tries to force it down sellers throats by hiding listing that charge for shipping and promoting those with free shipping and as such when selling on ebay now days you do get an advantage in listing placement with free shipping.
That doesn’t make it better in any way, shape or form.
many years ago when you could select shipping options without penalties I experimented extensively with free shipping vs calculated.
I ALWAYS had better sales, more orders and made more total money when I charged for shipping. With free shipping I hardly ever get multiple items orders, when charging for shipping I would get about 10-20% of orders would have multiple items in order to save on shipping. Right there that is 10-20% more sales.
Plus with “free shipping” you have to try to account for the highest possible shipping cost in the price hike but a lot of times you can’t actually charge that much due to other people undercutting you (particularly china sellers). So you are forced to drop the price to the point where you are not making what you want or need with most of the orders.
By charging for shipping though, those close to you see your item as the cheapest and will buy from you. Which is nice since shipping is faster as well.
There is nothing at all that I like about free shipping but then I don’t market to things in such a way to take advantage of the fact people are stupid not business savvy.
You need to a shipping cost, even if it`s not the full price every little bit helps, Do eBay include shipping cost in your chargable amount, As you see some buy it now items, with a low purchase cost but a high shipping cost.
John.
The the old days of ebay there was a loop hole that where shipping fees were not counted towards the total order and were exempt from fees. This led to issues with a $1 item and $100 in shipping to avoid the fees.
This is long gone now though, now ebay charges the fees for EVERYTHING. No more loop holes so there is no reason to over charge on shipping anymore and you do not see it much anymore as a result.
I think they are doing this to get rid of the small sellers. Most of their business comes from china sellers and re-sellers. Fees drop when the volume goes up. Unfortunately for the rest of us, nothing else has the volume of buyers so you have the choice of dealing with it or never selling your item. Craigslist only works for popular or large items and most people try to scam you.
You can’t even leave negative feedback for power sellers until 7 days pass and they are free to commit sales tax fraud or just flat out ship trash for a very long time before anything is done. For those guys giving the buyer all the power evens the odds.
The “free” shipping is another high volume seller thing. If you have a large business you can get discounts from the carriers themselves. Something costs you $15 to ship and the guy with the FedEx account gets to pay $8. They can’t really hide your listings if there are only 5 people selling the same thing, however. Its go big or be unique.
I agree that there’s no such thing as “free” shipping, but as a buyer, I look for it when I’m buying something.
The problem where I live (Canada), is that shipping costs are very high. If I have to pay the true cost of shipping, it usually makes the item not worth buying (unless it is an expensive item to begin with).
I have a belief that large sellers which advertise “free” shipping, actually do have a much lower shipping cost than sellers that charge for shipping. They fall into two categories:
1. Free shippers that have their government subsidize them. China is the prime example.
2. Free shippers that have huge volume discounts on their shipping prices. Amazon is an example.
In both cases, as a buyer I’m happy letting either a foreign government pay for my shipping, or a company using its bargaining power to give me cheap shipping.
So, free shipping? Yeah, I like it!
I know it’s not really “free”, but I simply won’t pay for shipping if I’m buying a $20 item. If instead they charge me $40 for a $20 item but call it free shipping, it’s easy to spot that price difference.
In the vast majority of cases unless it is a china seller or someplace like amazon, the shipping discounts for “normal” sellers, even high volume ones, is not nearly what people think it is.
Really free shipping is socialist shipping. Those close to the seller pay the extra to cover the losses on those that live far away. Great for those that live far away, really sucky for those that live close.
Not even remotely fair.
I’ve shipped back tons of equipment on company accounts and the amount charged was a lot lower, almost half of what I’d have to pay.
Correct, half of what you would pay in a store. They jack the prices way up in those since not only are you paying the shipping company but the store as well.
If you ship online though the cost is about 25-30% lower for anyone just by using the companies website.
Then ebay has a shipping contract with all the major carriers that drops the prices down about 15-25% on top of that.
So total cost for any ebay seller if you ship the item online (which you should always do) is about 40-50% lower then in store prices.
In volume you get minor discounts after that. I was shipping over 1500 packages a month at some points. While not super volume it was reasonable large and I can tell you from experience the discounts are not that great until you are talking like 100,000 shipments a month.
I wasn’t going by store prices. I don’t think I’ve ever paid to ship from one. Only online and the USPS counter (not for ebay). Maybe their volume was that high or they negotiated some kind of deal.
Isn’t that the case for almost every country’s postal service? A letter costs me the same postage stamp to mail anywhere in the country, and the same price to mail anywhere to the US.
I suppose you could make people pay more depending on the origin and destination of the letter, but I image the complexity of that would probably raise the price for everyone, and make even local letters just as expensive as before. Any system you design is going to have some compromises for simplification, and that is essentially socializing the price in the group you classify.
But I agree that in extreme cases, such as mail service in very remote areas, it does seem a little silly to make it the same price as for service in large cities. Maybe in those cases, they could simply provide service only a couple of times per month, or something like that to create the volume needed for cost reduction. Or, perhaps they already do that, I don’t know.
I can’t speak for other countries but in the US the only thing that is the same price for any location is first class mail (aka, letters). Any package shipped via any other service will have the fee adjusted according to the destination.
While similar it is really easier for the postal service to just set one price for all the letters vs trying to calculate a price for every one. It would cost them way more to try to manage different prices for each destination then just setting a fixed price. So in this case it is smart business since it actually saves money in the long run.
Not to mention it being nearly impossible for the average Joe to send a letter with the correct postage without going to the already stupid long lines at the post office. Which would cost the post office even more to manage said lines.
I can’t even imagine trying to charge for letters by distance from a business or management standpoint.