Ebay Fees?

Imo, it's not grossly excessive. Like you said, selling random stuff, it is what it is, and it's kinda all profit anyway, but if I plan on buying and flipping coins, yeah, the 13%, puts a crimp in it. I consider myself a low volume seller also, and ebay offered me a "store" deal for 4 months, and I took it. The ebay store fees for coins is 6%, which helps.

Also don't forget that top rated sellers get a 20% discount in their fees. So for coins you would only be paying 4.8% to ebay.
Much more tolerable than the 10% figure.

Could you explain your math on this one?

You didn't mention "store" in your original statement.

Stores carry a monthly burden (cost) of from $15.95 to $199.95 per month.

I agree with JeerseyBen.

If you had a coin store, that maybe sold other things too, just to stay open, 13% overhead would be a dream.

If you use your own web site you can hope someone finds you, or pay for a fee to advance you in searches. No real way of telling how well that "advertisement" helps in most cases.

You can do Craig's list, which is really free, and hope you are not mugged in the parking lot.

You can sell to a dealer, and even a great coin is not going to earn you much over 75% of the resale value, if you are lucky, the dealer loves you, and he is your father-in-law.

Buying at retail to sell at retail is never going to do anyone any good.

I suppose I hear what you guys are saying. Most of the coin I buy is a true long term hedge against inflation or the market and only a small part of my portfolio, and thus generally would not get sold or traded. In short I'm not on ebay enough to qualify for the top rated seller bit, I don't think so at any rate.

I just seem to recall in the not so distant past ebay charging a fee up to about $200...lets say 8%...and then something like 4% on all monies after that. So on a $1000 item under the old schema you'd be putting down about $80 in fees including PayPal's take, and they were still raking it in. It'd work out to 7.8% which I could take just fine given the exposure, etc. Heck I've lived in places with a 9.5% sales tax and I could take that too, especially knowing the money was going to fix the roads or educate the kids or whatever.

I'd like to say their profit goes to the ebay shareholders and in that case I'd just buy ebay stock and take my piece of the bounty but it's a terribly run company and the stock reflects that. In my opinion they've slowly raised fees over the years and will continue to do so until someone creates a viable alternative or the whole thing implodes.

But I digress. All this is coming from someone who's not a seller but rather looks at ebay as a vehicle for liquidity (ie a potential marketplace). When gazing through that lens their fees are a bit much. ebay more or less has a monopoly and they know it. That house of cards isn't long for the world, methinks.