Fees, Fees, And More Fees...

Ah, good ol' ebay. Gotta love it.

The problem is, you won't get a better deal anywhere else. You can try, but you won't. ebay is the best on-line place to sell, unless you have your own well established website.

Yeah, that's true in that ebay has the largest user base, but other auction sites don't nickel-and-dime as much. I just sold some stuff on ebay for the first time and was more than a little frustrated with all the fees. If I sell coins, I'm going to try the Coins N Currency (http://www.coinsncurrency.com/index.php) site I just read about this morning. Fees are essentially nonexistent!

Or, I might just create my own website. They are quite easy to create nowadays, and I bet pretty much anyone on here could create a simple business site for about $5 a month (I use https://www.1and1.com for my hosting needs). The trick would be getting people to visit the site, though!

gah... frustrating!

Regards,
~neuron

I'm not a big time seller or a business, just a guy who is strapped for cash trying to make a few bucks here and there. And selling low cost items really seems not to be worth it by the time all the fees are taken out.

quote:

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Originally posted by nds76

It really makes selling low cost items not worth listing. Did they raise their fees recently?

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Its pretty pricy for high cost items also. It,s one of those "danged if you do and danged if you don't" scenerio's.

nds76,if you just want to sell a few coins you could always try selling them here on the forum.

quote:

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Originally posted by neuron

Yeah, that's true in that ebay has the largest user base, but other auction sites don't nickel-and-dime as much. I just sold some stuff on ebay for the first time and was more than a little frustrated with all the fees. If I sell coins, I'm going to try the Coins N Currency (http://www.coinsncurrency.com/index.php) site I just read about this morning. Fees are essentially nonexistent!

Or, I might just create my own website. They are quite easy to create nowadays, and I bet pretty much anyone on here could create a simple business site for about $5 a month (I use https://www.1and1.com for my hosting needs). The trick would be getting people to visit the site, though!

gah... frustrating!

Regards,
~neuron

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First I would like to say thanks for mentioning my site.

Second, regarding the low cost, build your own sites out there, you honestly get what you pay for in most cases. To make a site that has the functions and capability that serious sellers want, you have to spend what to me is alot of money.
The next obsticle is getting your site known enough to get traffic. I have spent a ton of hours with free site listings and also way more money then the site cost me to build in advertising and I still have a somewhat limited exposure.
I know that Bobby and Susan can attest to the fact, it's not easy to get a quality site started.
The one good thing is that you also have a snowball effect out there. Once it gets well known, such as the CC forum, the people using it help a great deal in promotion just through word of mouth.
For most retail sites, it takes about 3-5 years for the site to really get going. Most people are not willing to take the time and effort to stick it out and that is the main reason most sites fail.
If you want to build another site then I wish you the best of luck. Anything is better then ebay.
There are tons of other sites out there as well.
If you want to try mine then of course I approve.
As I have told several people, I just want 1% of ebay's coin section listings.

Paypal is extremely unsafe if you don't follow theier rules. IE, ship to only confirmed addresses. Mom and I have been using them for years with no problems, but we follow their rules to the letter with no exceptions.

The fees are right in line with any merchant account. We pay 2.2% plus 30 cents per transaction. Check around, that's not out of line. If you want to see how these fees are worth paying, stop taking Paypal for a while and see what happens to your sale prices.

With all due respect to the free auction sites out there, I would rather sell my coin on ebay, get $20 for it and pay $3 in fees, than have it go for $10 and pay no fees, that's just common sense.

The reality of it is, unless ebay goes completely away, no other auction site is going to come close to being better for a seller (or even survive for that matter) than ebay. Look at Overstock, they've been around for a long time, spend millions on advertising, and still can't hold a candle to ebay.

Overstock right now has 2,915 listings in coins, ebay has 87,695. These numbers will be 10 times more skewed in the middle of January, when Christmas isn't in a few days. The buyers follow the sellers. Yahoo, one of the biggest Internet presences in the world, has less than half the listings of ebay.

Susan and I thought long and hard about starting an auction site and decided against. We even had about 25k in financial backing available, that was unsolicited, we didn't even ask for it. I'm talking contacts out of the blue, "If you start an coin auction site we'll put up $xxxxx". Some of them are members here. No kidding.

We were also in negotiations with the CEO of a major company (certified ebay developer at that, you've all heard of them) that had laid just about all of the groundwork for a new auction site. Susan and I were going to head up the entire numismatic division. He decided against it. Now this is a very business smart man that owns a multi-million dollar company.