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Comment by dankwizard | Hacker News Reader

Tried selling on eBay as a regular Joe lately? Item sold for roughly $190 and I lost $45 in fees - I didn't even have a premium ad or pay for any of the boosting.

No wonder Facebook marketplace has destroyed them

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The problem is with items that have a national market but not a local one. For example - there may be very few local buyers who will pay a decent price for a vintage slide rule, but many on eBay. My general strategy is to list on FBM first for the eBay price that I hope to get, and then accept offers down to 75% of the price. If I don't get any bites after about a month I switch to eBay.

This. I was selling an obscure book once. I doubt there is anyone local that would be interested in it. It was sold on eBay within a week.

Same for a half functioning Xbox. No "normal" person would want that. But apparently, on eBay, something like a dozen people took serious interest in it, and it was sold in a few days in "parts only" condition. For sure I didn't like how much the transaction fee I paid, but at least I got rid of it for a decent amount of money.

At least in the UK, I don't lose any of the selling price to fees, 0%. The buyer has additional buying fees on their side and postage is included in the final price.

Even if they use Paypal?

As someone who hasn't sold on eBay in a looooong time but was thinking about it for some stuff I haven't been able to sell on Marketplace, their pages and pages of fee structuring were intimidating. What was the breakdown of that $45, if you don't mind sharing?

Sure,

I listed the item as $185.00 + $10.00 shipping.

Order total = $195.00

- Transaction fees = $32.44

- Postage label = $14.65

Postage I can understand.

And, at least in the US, eBay charges their "final value fee" percentage on the order total (the sale price plus the shipping price paid by the buyer). So if the item has a 3% final value fee (the percentages differ across different categories of listings) then Ebay got $0.44 of additional fee from your $14.65 of shipping you paid to the shipping service. And there is no option to obtain a rebate on actual shipping paid, even if one purchases the shipping label from eBay themselves.

I suspect they (eBay) do this to avoid folks listing items for $1.00 with $194.00 shipping to avoid paying eBay any fees.

People definitely used to do that, yes.

Yes sold a fair bit and never had issues with fee deductions. Think it’s mostly deducted seller side

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