A new e-bay low!!!

I am fairly certain that the low end of a consignment auction is 10% - and that is if you sell enough. If you are putting in just a few items that are not going to bring money that % goes up ... I'll double check this if I can talk to the guy in our area that does it.

12% isn't all that bad - not when you think you sell your item and then they collect. You can cut some of those fees out by accepting cashiers checks, postal money orders, or personal checks.

KC

 

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It is too bad that ebay just doesn't put a cap on the fees - max of 10%.

I guess if someone thinks that ebay can make money at 3-5% ... they really ought to think about starting up an on-line auction house and set the fees at what they think are reasonable. If you can make money @ 5% and ebay is charging 12% - you will quickly buy up market share.

 

Well -- except that you really won't. I mean, if I have a choice between eBay, where 10,000 people will see my item and I'll pay 12% of the final bid, or ioioBay, where 25 people will see my item and I'll pay 5% of the final bid, I'll be sticking with eBay. There's just no good way to overcome eBay's entrenched advantage. Unless you do a Craigslist, dropping fees to zero and targeting local buyers/sellers, or something else equally orthogonal to eBay's current approach.

 

Feebay is for buyers not sellers. Always has been and always will. In Canada we have Kijiji that lets you sell things for free.

 

Very true, but Ebay is not invulnerable. What would have to happen would be someone dropping some money on an alternate site with pleasing conditions to sellers, as well as promises that they will not ever get as bad as Ebay.

An auction site is all about critical mass. Get enough people to move their goods off Ebay to another site and the buyers would follow. Honestly, for ancient coins at least, Ebay prices are mostly too high for me for the quality offered. I look still, but do not buy off Ebay for ancient. I still buy some junk lots of world coins from time to time, but even that has gotten very rare. To me, it seems there are more buyers on Ebay now than seller, since prices are getting chased up too high for what I shop for, and versus other venues.

 

I stumbled across this thread, and it reminded me of something I did about 10 years ago. I was browsing through oil paintings on Ebay, and saw a ton of them for $0.01, with a buy it now price. I thought, WOW, I can buy this painting for a penny!! So I went and bought 10 of them. Only after I bought them, did I notice the shipping was $30 each!! I learned my lesson real quick to see what the shipping costs were before I bought anything else on ebay!

 

It's a shame that Yahoo killed off their auction site.

 

Learned the same thing on ebay buying a CD ... not nearly as much as you. Since then - I set a price of what I'll spend and that must include shipping. Also - I will generally lean toward the item with the lower shipping and pay them more for the item. Figure if they are closer to the true cost of shipping I'll buy from them.

KC

 

Ebay may not be the only game in town but they are the best for the smaller buyers and sellers. You forget that many other auction houses featuring numismatic items, also have minimum value requirements. You cannot go to Stacks & Bowers or Heritage and sell just anything. It must meet their standards for value and most likely, be verified by a TPG. These restrictions are not part of eBay. This is a double edged sword, leaving the door open for the less knowledgeable to be taken advantage of. But where else can you go to get their kind of exposure for your 1964 Kennedy half dollar, mint sets or your wheat cents?

 

Unfortunately the 1964 Kennedy Half dollars, mint sets, wheat cents, and other numismatic items which aren't worth much means that there is a much smaller margin for profit and with all the nickel and diming that eBay does, they take anything you have made, and sometimes more. All you have done is deal with the customer and ship and item to them only to make eBay richer and you breaking even. Also, these items are inexpensive because they're fairly common for the demand that's out there. It means that you have to compete with everyone else on there who are selling the same stuff so you have to price your items competitively to sell anything, lowering your margin for profit even more. It's just not worth it.

 

There are times where breaking even is not such a bad thing. If you can do this with items of little consequence, you can repurchase using the same money but more to your advantage.

 

So... you're looking for a venue with few sellers, but lots of uneducated buyers, willing to pay a premium (non-competitive) price for common items. Does that about cover it?

 

I think a lot of people have never tried selling anything on ebay and have no idea what it amounts to. Anybody considering a purchase on there should realize that if they ever need to re-sell the item/coin/whatever, they will need to re-sell it for AT LEAST 12% MORE than they originally paid for it, JUST TO BREAK EVEN. If more people knew this, it would probably drive prices down. I've sold just a few coins here and there and couldn't break even on most. Plus the time involved in doing it. If I ever consider selling something, the thought of the fees usually changes my mind.

About the only way you could possibly flip for a profit would be rising melt value or cherry picking something from somebody who doesn't realize what they have. Toners may vary widely, to your favor or not.

So yeah, the goal of breaking even on most stuff is a tall order. A 13% profit is a 1% profit to the actual seller. Which is why you'll see some sellers list unrealistically high, tack on high shipping (and hope it gets missed) in hopes of overcoming ebay and paypals cut to have a decent profit left over for themselves. The buyer loses.

The bad part is, ebay is cheaper than most other places. But I wouldn't call it cheap.

 

The problem isn't that eBay charges fee's including shipping now, it's that they didn't properly adjust their fee rates to account for the change.

 

No. I'm looking for a venue where I can charge a fair price and make a fair profit. Ebay's schemes do not promote a fair profit.

Vess1, I like your elaboration.

 

Classic supply & demand theory of economics. When the supply is high the price tends to go low. Until the supply is reduced the price will seldom increase. The sellers need to keep their coins reducing the supply thus in time increasing the price.