ebay will tell you that people were charging too much for shipping so they added the fee on the shipping to keep people from avoiding the fee.
here is the thing!
ebay now makes more money than ever from this fee on shipping. They have become what they said the seller was. It is all about making money for ebay . In my opinion they have destroyed there own mission which was to provide a fair marketplace for all goods and sellers
do the math and base it on 2,000,000 transactions per day and a minimum fee charged of 25 cents which is pretty much the minimum shipping and run it out over a quarter ( 90 days).
that would be 500,000 per day or 45,000,000 per quarter.
In reality the amount of tranactions could be much higher and obviously the shipping fees total much more because many things are much heavier to ship.
it is conceivable based on the real numbers of transactions and actual shipping costs that ebay brings in 200 to 400 million per quarter. (many shipping fees are several dollars and ebay says themselves that they have 160 million buyers) Now anyone with a brain can see that this is not fair or beneficial to anyone but ebay. The fact is when ebay started doing this the fvf on the things i sell were 15% and didn't change for a significant period of time.
The other thing is if you have noticed all the fees on listing upgrades have increased dramatically , the discounts have dropped or dropped completely while demands on selling have increased to nearly impossible levels assuring that many will not receive any discounts at all. I believe some of the rules are designed to destroy small sellers because they cannot be complied with or people don't want to be forced into compliance which what ebays uses(coercian) to eventually pay to promote their listings. for example: tracking numbers--many items if they can ship as a letter have no tracking, international shipments have no tracking and when it started there was no 1st class tracking unless you did ebay labels
the result of this and many other things ebay has done in the last few years to destroy small sellers (because they can make just as much from fees and coercian than they can from actual selling fees)is this:
My sales haves plummeted to where i cannot restock or pay my fees or my bills or have a comcast account , 800 a month to nearly zero--40-60 sales a month to nearly zero--two sales a day to nearly zero.
today is the 12th--no sales yet this month and only a few last month.
I am so sick of ebay blaming sellers for bad sales or telling about bots which are fake views
I have three accounta and none of them are doing much of anything and the one that i used to do very well on gets sometimes zero views or watchers when the same listings used to avg 20-40 views and 20 watchers during similar listing durations.
pay closer attention to your listings folks and you will see what i mean
Of course the man on the phone will tell you ebay is doing fine and their last quarterly was great and seen an increase. It is because they have suckered most of their sellers into higher fees that have nothing to do with fvf.--- when there is no exposure sales go down and so does your dream of making money on line
