@partsalot wrote:
yes. ebay sucks. Many of us are here because we have to be in a horrible economy to try and make some extra cash. I think ebay knows this and are willing to squeeze us for every peny they can. thats the free market. there are competetors coming but they are not quite up to the task of lowering prices.
I read a number of the comments. a lot of people say just ad the costs back in. that would be fine except for one big problem.
you don't have to know how to run a business in order to sell on ebay. many people are pretty dense. it takes some people a lot of time before they realize they are not making money. so they have things priced low to sell.
One of the first comments I read was a guy who was selling ipods. he figured out pretty quick that he wasn't making money. there is some reason he can not raise his prices. probably because he was smart enough to price things in a way that they would actually sell. You can't just decide your going to double your money on an ipod. every one would have to make the same decision at once. they don't. the price war ensues. some one sells ipods and next to no profit or no profit a all. takes a while to figure it out and drops out of the market while another new seller takes his place.
I have 3 seller accounts. I always run into low ball prices from newer sellers.
I get product cheap enough to sell low. I am lucky. I can make profit. My over all sales suffer though. I can not get enough product to sell at high enough prices to make money AND low enough to not sit on the shelf for ever. I earn a little extra money by being careful.
ebay may have the same idea many other have. sellers can just raise their prices so ebay can make more money. IT doesn't work that way though. and they probably won't bother figuring that out until some one forces them to. Mean while you better jump through them hoops to get your discount. you'll need it.
I wouldn't doubt that tech is replacing people. except that has been going on for some time. Believe it or not it used to take a group of 5 people to manufacture saftey pins before the industrial age. its not a new factor or even one that has increased. We used to turn furniture legs one at a time by hand. now a machine does it (probably in another country) at super quick speed. that change took place some time ago yet we still managed to increase our economy and the number of jobs thatwere available.
job growh should be natural because population growth is. the way I see baby boomers retiring should be a boon to employment because the vast majority of those jobs would still exist in a healthy economy not to mention an entire generation of retired people spending their life savings and not taking up room in the labor force.
Your example reminded me of president obamas example of "we have less jobs because some one invented the atm and now we don't need bank tellers as much". we had the atm quite a while back. Its as bad of an excuse as saying we need less carpenters now because some one invented the nail gun. we don't need to swing so many hammers.
the economy is in bad shape and i think it could easily get much worse if we are willing to take bad excuses in place of job growth.
