John's Technology Blog

eBay encourage/force you to lose money on postage

2009-12-10T12:00:00+10:00

eBay's postage calculator is a very useful tool for sellers but does not allow you to add any surcharge to cover handling or the fee that PayPal (an eBay company) will take out of the postage amount if a buyer chooses PayPal.

Not only that but eBay enforce sometimes unreasonable postage and handling charge limits on certain categories, for example a single book has a postage and handling charge limit less than the cost of postage to many areas of Australia. On top of tht they take their fee when payment is by PayPal so your loss is increased.

So you may need to up your item price to cover the money lost on postage charges, but of course then eBay take a larger commission from the sale.

Unfair eBay fees for used cars

2008-06-10T12:00:00+10:00

Having just been through the process of selling a cheap used car on eBay I have seen first hand the unfairness of eBay's fees for this category.

By a cheap car I mean $250.

eBay's fees are $5 for the listing and a fixed commission of $40 upon successful sale.

For a $250 car that means the fees total nearly 20%.

Selling a $50,000 car? Your fees would be just a fraction of 1%.

I realise that eBay have to be price competitive with other online car advertising sites but surely for cheap cars they could have a lower commission based on the sale price.

Now I see why I often see cheap used cars advertised outside of the used car category.

I hate PayPal

2008-04-15T12:00:00+10:00

Found an interesting contradition while paying for a purchase through PayPal today.

If you read my previous post about how PayPal/eBay effectively forced me to upgrade to a fee-paying due to their requirement for all sellers to accept credit cards, even on the limited free account.

For the payments I made tonight I see now that PayPal are trying to "guide" people towards making payments by bank transfer rather than credit card. They do this by defaulting to make the payment by bank transfer, making it difficult to change to credit card (by making the confirmation button almost look greyed out so you could easily accidently click the wrong button), and by various warnings about why you shouldn't pay by credit card.

My guess is that bank transfers are more profitable than credit card transactions and that credit cards are not so secure for PayPal -- people can easily cancel purchases through their credit card issuer which creates extra work for PayPal and could result in losses.

Anyway, I was a little angered to see the following message when I was "warned" against paying by credit card:

"Note: Sellers with Personal accounts cannot receive credit card payments. Any PayPal user can receive bank account payments."

Does this seem like the practices of an honest company?

eBay Announcement - PayPal will be required on all listings

2008-04-12T12:00:00+10:00

So eBay have announced that as of May/June 2008 virtually all auctions will have to be paid for by PayPal. (See http://pages.ebay.com.au/useprotection/changes.html)

Looking on the positive side, given my recent experience with fraud on eBay, this change will certainly make transactions safer.

But I wonder if eBay have any plans to reduce PayPal fees now that everyone will be forced to use PayPal. Will they include PayPal fees as part of the estimate calculated when you preview a new item listing I wonder?

As I am also involved with a business that lists around a thousand items at any one time on eBay, I am not happy that we can no longer offer our usual forms of payment. We would certainly like to continue to offer accepting credit cards directly (much cheaper than accepting credit cards through PayPal). I would say that credit cards are at least as secure form of payment as PayPal so not allowing them unless through PayPal goes against eBay's claims of this being for the protection of eBay customers.

They will stand to make a lot more profit in PayPal fees which is most certainly some motivation for the change.

Hopefully this change will give some people the impetus to look at some of the alternatives such as Oztion.

I got defrauded!

2008-04-02T12:00:00+10:00

Well for the first time I won something on eBay, paid for it, and it never arrived.

I paid immediately upon winning the item by bank deposit as that was the only method the seller accepted. Bank deposit seemed like a reasonably safe payment method as it is traceable.

Within a week the item hadn't arrived and other people who also won the same auction (it was a multiple listing) had already given the seller a negative rating. About this time eBay sent me a generic email warning me that I may have received a fraudulant offer from this seller.

Then they sent another generic email saying the auction had been cancelled and the result was null and void. Here's a quote from it:

"eBay has cancelled all bids or offers on this listing and you no longer have any obligation to purchase the item. If the seller chooses to relist the item, you're welcome to bid on it again."

Not much use after the auction ended, eBay. And removing the listing also removed my record of the seller, their contact details and any of eBay's dispute resolution channels (not that they would help anyway).

I notice the seller has also been deregistered.

In eBay's help pages they suggest reporting these incidents with the police. eBay have not made this easy as they have removed the listing, and will not provide contact details because I cannot provide a valid listing number. All I have is the seller's user name, the listing number and the bank account details.

I have sent eBay a question about what they can do to help.

Will report updates here if anything actually happens.

Feb 18-25th 2008: Worldwide Ebay Strike

2008-02-12T12:00:00+10:00

eBay keyword searches and hyphens

2008-01-18T12:00:00+10:00

When listing items on eBay that have hyphens in model numbers it is a good idea to include the model number with and without a hyphen in the title.

For example, if you were selling Mazda MX-5 car parts then you should put in your title both 'MX-5' and 'MX5'.

If someone searches for 'MX5' and you only have 'MX-5' in your title your listing will not show.

If someone searches for 'MX-5' and you only have 'MX5' in your title your listing will not show.

However, if you were selling a Mazda MX-5 car then you could only put 'MX5' in your title as eBay will match the 'MX-5' from the category name.

With the maximum length of eBay titles set at a low 55 characters it certainly pays to have an understanding of eBay's search system.

I will continue with this topic in future articles.

Tips for Bulk Sellers

2008-01-12T12:00:00+10:00

If you list and relist (or are planning to) hundreds of items or more with eBay, and you don't use Turbo Lister, then at some time you will probably have to change some detail in all of your listings. For example, if your contact details are shown in your item description and they change.

It can be a very time consuming process to make these sort of changes to all of your listings.

I work closely with a business that usually has close to 1,000 listings at any one time, and over the years they have had to make several changes, such as when they changed ABN, eBay user ID, postage costs, their telephone number, and once when their listings contained a violation of eBay rules (a link).

The solution I came up with for them was to put all of their contact details, shipping costs, payment terms, etc into a graphic file (hosted on their own server) and include that in each listing.

When there is a change, we simply change the graphic file and all listings are always up to date.

The other advantage is that they can easily track how many total page views they are getting on eBay through their server statistics, and what the most popular products are.

Depending on how you list and relist, you should consider this if there is the possibility that any of your details may change.

Understanding Sub-titles

2008-01-02T12:00:00+10:00

Looking at eBay listings it seems a lot of people misuse the 'sub-title' field.

Filling this field with keywords is usually a waste of money as they will not be searched unless potential buyers specify searching titles and descriptions indstead of the default of titles only.

The true value of this field is in displaying information that might persuade a buyer to click on and look at your item.

For example, putting something like "Free Postage" or "Hurry, last one!" in this field could be advantageous. That is, if you didn't have room to put that message in the title.

Remember sub-titles are an optional service and have a fee so only use them if there is a good point to it.

Save your title for important keywords and use sub-title only if you run out of room and have an important message!

eBay: The Competition

2007-12-25T12:00:00+10:00

Many have tried to complete against eBay and all have failed to make a significant impact.

Yahoo! probably had the best chance of success. Years ago they had an auction facility where people could search locally or internationally (before eBay did) and was completely free to buy and sell. The service seemed very popular.

Later, in Australia, Yahoo bought out the successful Australian auction site, sold.com.au, and integrated it into their own auction system. They started charging final value fees and removed the international search ability. Within a very short time they had destroyed both Yahoo auctions and sold.com.au.

In Australia Yahoo now just refer visitors to eBay. Internationally, Yahoo auctions is still operating in the USA (see auctions.yahoo.com) but is very small now.

Today, in Australia eBay's most serious competitor is Oztion (pronounced "aus-shun", kind of rhymes with "auction"). Whilst Oztion have nowhere near the number of customers and item listings, they are certainly worth a look when buying and selling.

Wrap-up of competition to eBay Australia:

Oztion (www.oztion.com.au)

Free to list, cost for listing enhancements and a fee if the item sells

Australia only

Swap Ace (www.swapace.com)

Offer different types of selling in addition to auctions including swapping and negotiating

Completely free

International site, with Australian section

Bid Mate (www.bidmate.com.au)
Auction Bidz (www.auctionbidz.com.au)
Ozebid (www.ozebid.com.au)
[These auction sites seem to be the same]

Free to list, cost for listing enhancements and a fee if the item sells

Bid Sell (www.bidsell.com.au)

Free to list, cost for listing enhancements and a fee if the item sells

International site, with Australian section

eBay Sign In Problems

2007-12-18T12:00:00+10:00

eBay seem to be having some more issues with their account sign in facility.

When I sign in I always check the box "Keep me signed in today" so that I don't have to keep signing in (obviously).

But throughout the day I have to keep signing in.

Sometimes I might sign in, sell something then attempt to do something else and I get asked to sign in again.

I don't have this problem with other websites so I presume it is their problem, not mine.

The real cost of selling on eBay

2007-12-11T12:00:00+10:00

Selling inexpensive items on eBay can be real expensive, particularly if people pay by PayPal (an eBay company).

Let's have a look at the real cost of selling an example cheap item.

The example assumes you have a PayPal Premier/Business Account which they basically force you to do (see separate blog entry, "PayPal Issues").

This is a real world example. I list car magazines for 99c (and many of them don't reach a higher price) and a pre-paid postage envelope for these is $2.70 within Australia or $11.60 to countries like the USA.

Item sale price $0.99
Postage cost $2.70
Total $3.69

eBay/PayPal fees:

Listing fee $0.30
Final value fee $0.05
PayPal fee $0.39
Total fees $0.74

74c is 20% of the total amount received.

If you charged postage at cost then that would mean you made only 25c of your 99c sale price!

Now, imagine that the item was sold to someone overseas and the postage cost was closer to $11.60, keep in mind that PayPal fees are higher for other currenies. You really want to know? Read on for an example of a sale to a US buyer:

Item sale price $0.99
Postage cost $11.60
Total $12.59

Listing fee $0.30
Final value fee $0.05
PayPal fee $0.73
Total fees $1.08

You just made an 9c loss on your 99c sale!

eBay and PayPal fees don't sound too much when viewed separately but when you add them all up they make it very expensive to sell inexpensive items on eBay.

I suggest that you don't provide postage at cost. Always add a dollar or two as a handling charge to ensure that it pays your PayPal fee.

The following link is for a web site where you can calculate the PayPal fees for a transaction or do a reverse calaculation to work out how much you should charge to receive a specific amount:

PayPal Fee Calculator

And this link is for calculating eBay fees, and can also calculate combined eBay and PayPal fees:

eBay Fee Calculator

Selling is so slow!

2007-12-04T12:00:00+10:00

Thanks eBay for another free listing period. It's a great opportunity to try and sell some items without having to pay unless they sell (and minimising those excessive fees).

But why does it have to be so slow to list items for sale?

Yes I know my computer is a few years old now and I should probably be looking through the computer section to buy a new computer so I can list items for sale without getting so frustrated at the slow speed at which it happens.

But my computer is fine on 99% of the other web sites I visit so why should I?

Then I speak to my friends and family who also sell on eBay and they tell me it is very slow for them too, and some of them have brand new computers.

eBay, if you are listening, you can keep your new selling system and make it available to people who have a Cray super-computer. But for the rest of us please consider creating a simpler method of the selling form without all the fancy features! Please! I don't think I will survive another free day when I have to list 200 items or more!

PayPal issues

2007-11-27T12:00:00+10:00

The problem with PayPal in my opinion:

eBay effectively force you to accept PayPal payments by their extensive advertising of PayPal and their buyer protection schemes. The majority of the free days now have PayPal as a requirement too.

A personal PayPal account is free to receive payments but how long can you keep a personal PayPal account before they effectively force you to upgrade to the fee-paying Premier/Business account?

They do this by only allowing you to accept a small number of credit card transactions each year (5 from memory).

No problem, you think, I just won't accept credit card transactions. Wrong! According to eBay/PayPal rules you must accept all forms of PayPal-accepted payment types if you list PayPal as a payment option.

Ok, so looks like you will have to upgrade to a Premier/Business account after all. So you will just advertise a small surcharge for PayPal payments. Wrong again! Another eBay/PayPal rule violation.

See my other blog entry, "The real cost of selling on eBay", for how much PayPal fees impact on selling low cost items on eBay.

Don't sell your items too cheap!

2007-11-20T12:00:00+10:00

After taking advantage of eBay's Christmas free listing offer I got another one of those "item removed due to circumvention of fees" alerts.

This seems to happen if you list an item at a very low starting price or "buy now" price (99c) with a high postage cost (for example, $9.30).

Now if I want post an item that weighs over 500g up to 3kg anywhere in Australia then it makes sense to post it in a parcel post satchel which for weights over 500g costs $9.30.

Unfortunately eBay don't seem to see it this way and will remove the item claiming that you are trying to circumvent paying higher commissions.

It appears that the people at eBay who look after this area have no idea about Australia Post charges for parcels.

Of course, if you are outside of Australia then it seems you can charge whatever you like for postage and handling and eBay turn a blind eye. Just look at all those foreign sellers on eBay Australia who have very low prices for electronics with huge postage and handling costs.

Anyway, back to my case. I have had these alerts several times in the past. Last time I tried to plead my case to eBay they first told me that an eBay member must have complained about my postage costs and eBay automatically removed my items. Really? Does this mean I can complain about my competition's postage costs and have them all removed?

After many emails backward and forward eBay eventually removed the suspension that they had given to me from my account that prevented me from listing any further items. They never apologised or admitted any fault, just warned me that I shouldn't do wrong again.

So my advice is, if you are ever selling cheap, heavy items, do not list postage costs. Ask people to contact you for a postage quote.