So we’ve been selling on eBay for over ten years and it’s been a great market for us. They’ve just hiked up the fees again – in fact my latest invoice is so high it makes selling on eBay not feasible for us as a business any longer.
The big hike here is on the final value and the fees eBay deducts when you sell your items. We haven’t had a particularly busy month yet my fees for this month are almost £4 K – that’s just plain ridiculous. It’s just not sustainable. I could have a shop on a major street in London for that and arguably get more returns for it.
To me it’s just PLAIN GREEDY of eBay. They are a very profitable company – why do they have to squeeze long standing small business’ like ourselves? Surely they make enough money out of us? What with PayPal fees as well.
Also, when you consider how bad the economy is it is totally bad timing. You’d think they’d want to encourage and nurture small business owners such as ourselves rather than totally crucify the market. As it stands we will have to put our prices up by 10% to help cover this increase in fees – it’s just not encouraging in this current climate. In fact it’s just totally stupid. And, I’ll say it again, PLAIN GREEDY!
I don’t know what the future holds now with us and eBay. It’s always been good for us and put our products in front of the right eyeballs – but I don’t feel very optimistic about the future. Money spent on eBay fees might better be channelled elsewhere.
Has anyone else had the same problem recently?
We’ve been selling a lot more via our website – Canonbury Antiques – and this is clearly the long term future for us.
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