Is Ebay Becoming too Greedy and too Difficult for Small Sellers?

Is Ebay Becoming too Greedy and too Difficult for Small Sellers?

I've been selling on a small scale on ebay for about 4 years now. I used to see all the complaints from ebay sellers back when I started selling and I didn't understand what the fuss was over. Now that I've been through several years of pro-buyer policy changes and pro ebay fee changes I'm starting to see the problem.

I love the idea behind ebay: a place where anyone can go to sell merchandise with a feedback system and a dispute process to protect everyone. In theory it should be a level playing field for both seller and buyer alike with equal risk for both.

Instead ebay does little to protect honest and trustworthy small sellers. The last several years have seen ridiculous policy changes that are far too biased and one-sided. All the policies seem to protect buyers and actually make things much more difficult for us honest sellers. We have to deal with malicious buyers who want to abuse the feedback and "item not as described" dispute processes. Malicious and dishonest buyers can easily use negative feedback and poor detailed seller rating scores to hold honest small ebay sellers hostage. While I certainly understand the importance of buyer protection policies, ebay is focusing far too much on this topic and creating a hostile and alienating environment for its sellers.

As if the pro-buyer biased policies and dispute process weren't enough, ebay continually raises fees. The latest change has basically resulted in ebay not double, but triple dipping into what slim profits remain for small sellers. Ebay now charges a final value fee based on the the total transaction amount. In other words...ebay now charges sellers a final value fee on the shipping charges they collect from the customer. I understand this is intended to prevent sellers from hiding profits in their shipping charges by over charging for shipping. Unfortunately this new fee policy does nothing but hurt the honest seller once again. Many sellers, like me, simply pass the exact cost of shipping on to the customer. Now ebay takes a percentage of the money the buyer pays me to cover the exact shipping charges. This means I either have to raise prices, which in turn just means ebay will take more, or I eat a small loss on shipping charges now on top of all the other ways ebay manages to snatch profits.

Consider the typical listing process. You want to list a product. Of course you need to pay a listing fee. Not so bad right? Do you want a subtitle for your listing? That will cost extra. Do you need a bold title? Extra. Will you need more than 1 photo? That's gonna cost you more too. How about a gallery view so you can offer larger images in search results? We'll just tack on a fee for that too. Oh you want your listing to run a few days longer? That's another fee.

Now that your item is listed you can take a breather. I guess that wasn't so bad right? I mean after all, many of those listing fees were optional expenses you could simply say "no thanks" to. (That is unless you are competing with any other motivated higher volume sellers).

If you are lucky enough to sell your item the real fun starts. Your customer pays you the final bid amount/listed price plus shipping charges. Of course there will be a final value fee based on the total transaction amount. At least your ebay fees are done right? Not so fast! That customer of yours probably paid via PayPal, right? Well PayPal just so happens to be owned by none other than ebay and guess what? Paypal has to charge you a fee yet too. So kiss another 2.9% plus $.30 goodbye.

Don't get me wrong here. I totally understand ebay needs to make a profit. I realize ebay gets my products in front of a great number of visitors each and every day. I have no problem paying for services rendered. I just ask, when is enough enough? I recently did some calculations and discovered I'm losing, on average, 17-18% of my profits to ebay. Pretty scary considering I don't even take advantage of most of ebay's optional upgraded listing fees.

Things are getting to the point where small sellers like me will be forced out because we are continually caught in a vicious cycle caused by ebay greed. Ebay raises fees so we are forced to pass those fee increases on to our customers. So we charge more. That results in reduced sales and less satisfied customers because we raised prices. After we raise prices that means ebay gets to take slightly more based on the increased final value fee and the cycle continues.