Has anyone here noticed that the bay is struggling?

Recent eBay revenue:

• EBay revenue for the quarter ending December 31, 2018 was $2.877B, a 6.28% increase year-over-year.
• EBay revenue for the twelve months ending December 31, 2018 was $10.746B, a 8.25% increase year-over-year.
• EBay annual revenue for 2018 was $10.746B, a 8.25% increase from 2017.
• EBay annual revenue for 2017 was $9.927B, a 6.76% increase from 2016.
• EBay annual revenue for 2016 was $9.298B, a 8.22% increase from 2015.

 

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I have bought and sold on EBay for 20 years, though admittedly only ~360 transactions. I have only had one instance of having been defrauded by a seller and I have never been defrauded by a buyer. Some mild drama over returns but nothing too serious.

 

Dang it! I appreciate the information, luckily I checked with you guys today! That sucks! Looks like I'll be spending more time with my local coin club.

 

In response to Wayfair v South Dakota my state has a bill (may have already passed in the current session of the General Assembly) addressing collection of sales tax on internet sales. This legislation designates any sale through a marketplace as a sale of the marketplace facilitator (a facilitator would be Ebay, Amazon and etc) as opposed to a sale of the actual seller. Therefore the liability and responsibility of collecting the tax from the buyer and remitting the tax to the state will fall on the facilitator and not the actual seller.

 

In addition to my previous post:
Here is an interesting tidbit. Amazon made 11.8 billion in profit last year and paid zero federal tax. Corporate rates which are lower than personal rates, they should have paid over 2 billion dollars. In fact, they had a negative tax rate and got back 1%, 130 million dollars. So suckers like you and I who have to pay our taxes, they are just taking our money that we pay in, and giving it to Amazon (who doesn't need it) for nothing.

 

The new postage rates (1/27/19) have added an added burden for the small seller - eBay seller fee + paypal fee + $4 postage (avg. for FCM pkg. < 4 oz.) + tracking fee = not a lot of profit margin

 

As was said, $20,000 but also used to be anything over 200 sales which is easy to do with low ball items. But I get a tax report for anything now (Pay Pal), all listed by monthly sales. I sold less than $1,000 last year and still got a 1099.

 

The comments made were just awesome and made me feel like "its not me". Shipping costs for the more affordable products knock them completely out of that category. In addition, buyers are now conditioned by Amazon to expect far different than the small guy can afford to provide....guess that is business. I sell a heavier item than coins and just get hammered by shipping costs. I used to buy some coins on ebay, but it has become a challenge lately. I wish everyone here at coin talk well, thank you for all the informative discussions and hope that ebay will react to losing business in a favorable way. Southpaw Don

 

Which is where you can really blame the promoted listing functions and eBay's decision to not show every listing to every person. It's really easy to pay 15-20% and get your listing promoted to show up in everything while having others hidden when you're selling junk/fakes that have huge margins.

Any of them doing it daily or every three days with substantial amounts of material are all big sellers though that are paying for those listings with their higher subscriptions. The normal person gets 50 free a month which would quickly be used if they were bumping things daily.

Big sellers have different rules on eBay anyway.

 

Yep, I'm ready, I doubt I'll make it to $20,000 but you never know stranger things have happened!

Me too, I got so many great deals it was unbelievable! Now, I'm starting to sell off some of my tokens. I never counted them before but I have 3 big binders full of tokens and medals I gotta list. Wish I would have done it a few years ago but with everything, I live and I learn!

 

I’m fairly certain it’s still 200 transactions AND $20,000 in sales.

So if you sold 500 items for $10,000, there would be no form automatically sent to you.

Here is the info:
https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp...RS-Will-I-receive-a-1099-tax-statement-FAQ729

 

I will point out that Amazon has significant carry-forward losses from previous years, and these are used to offset current and future net income. Once the carry-forward losses are exhausted, they will begin paying income taxes.

 

It's a 1099K I got, not 1099C, my whoops.

 

Although I have done the majority of my buying and selling through eBay, there are definitely some improvements they could make to the format.

1. The auction listings are cluttered with items with opening bids set above retail. To cut down on this, EBay should charge a final value fee for auction listings whether they sell or not. They already do this with reserve auctions. Not only would this declutter the auction category, but it could also encourage more listings by truly setting apart the bona fide auctions from the overpriced junk.

2. They should also consider charging a fee for buy it now listings that don’t sell within a set period (say 60 days) or are pulled early. That would encourage people to price listings to sell and discourage the use of listings as free advertising for sale through other venues.

3. At the very least bring back the previous option to sort by number of bids. That used to help weed out the high opening bids.

 

That would cost them a ton of money and many people would just walk away. The only reason auctions are done that way by many sellers is that your 500 listings are split between BINs and auctions for the store fee. Not doing that and letting sellers dictate how to list their items would be a much better solution.

The truth is they almost certainly want listings to be wasted hoping you will spend more on them when you run out.

Great way to kill the company. The day they do that basically every small seller will leave

 

I’ll admit that I’m not familiar with how the store fees work, so maybe I’m missing something. I just don’t understand why 90+ percent of the listings seem to be way above even the higher range of completed sales prices. I get the idea of starting high and negotiating offers from there. But what’s the point of doing that in an auction listing? Isn’t that what BIN with best offer is for?

They have succesfully put the kibosh on reserve auctions. I still wish they could do something to declutter the high opening bids.

 

The stores get a set number of listings for what you pay for. The affordable highest one which is still 20+ a month for a year gives you 500 listings a month, but it's 250 BINs 250 actions.

IF they let sellers choose how to use their listings the auction stuff would change drastically.

Also free shipping isn't really free and the rising USPS costs are a factor since you essentially have to offer free shipping on eBay now.

With how they dictate listings unless you want to pay 60 a month for a year minimum their restrictions on how you can use the listings that you pay for cause you to use auctions as a BIN listing. More importantly the fact that they hide listings from buyers and the new promoted nonsense which is horrendous for coins, sellers have to protect themselves

 

I wasn’t aware of any of that. Sounds like they have created a monster. How does the hiding of listings work? If I pull up a search, say, PCGS and NGC large cents, does that mean I won’t see all of them?

 

They used to do that. If I recall correctly, every listing incurred a listing fee -- something like 5 cents for auction starting at 99 cents or less, 25 cents for auctions starting at $9.99 or less, and two or three categories beyond that. If you put a reserve on your auction, there was an additional fee that was a stepped percentage of your reserve. I thought that scheme made a lot of sense, and it definitely kept down the noise level. FVFs were also graduated, with the percentage falling as the final value rose, and all much lower than today's fees.

But eBay eventually decided that Volume is King, and the more items they have listed, the better, even if most of them are garbage. The fee schedule was adjusted repeatedly, until we got the scheme we have today, which is great for the high-volume seller and the clueless newbie, but pretty sad for those in the middle.