mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
@sweethot29-us wrote:eBay has not charged 5% commission in years. I pay 13% and have paid 11.2% (+/-) for years before that. 5% is about 7 or 8 years ago.
IDK how you got such a good rate back in 2016/2015. I certainly never had that. Maybe there was a special promotion in the category in which you sell in. But most sellers didn't have that.
In previous years, before going into Managed Payments, you are right. Most sellers paid about 10.2% to Ebay in FVFs and then 2.9% to Paypal, for a total of 13.1%.
Then we moved to MP where Ebay is processing the payments and PayPal is no longer processing our seller payments. So now most sellers pay 12.9 in fees to Ebay and no longer have fees to PayPal.
@sweethot29-us wrote:My sales on eBay have tanked. $839 in 3 months! I’m used to doing about $1300-$1800 in 3 months. I have been on eBay 10 years. 100% positive feedback. My sales totally tanked. I went to Office Depot to ship some cheap item. The guy that worked there said: your still on eBay? He said he left eBay and showed me his sales on Mercari. He said eBay has not kept up with competition. He said they charge too much to the customer on shipping and make a commission on the shipping the customer pays. He said Mercari has a $11.99 flat shipping rate so it won’t be by weight. My customers on eBay pay $21 for a large flat rate USPS PRIORITY ship. $17 for medium. No one wants to do it. My Daughter is selling like crazy on Poshmark. Again, flat rate shipping of about $7.99. It’s the shipping. It’s to expensive now with all these other resellers charging less. Buyers see the shipping and move on. I don’t make money on shipping. I admit myself, the shipping is too high. I probably will have to switch. This guy and my Daughter showed me their sales. I work hard at my eBay and discount constantly. Maybe time for a change.
Your Office Depot guy is partially correct. All carriers ship by weight. While Mercari may have a flat rate that can be charged to buyers no matter what the item is, Mercari has clearly decided they make money using this method. But Mercari would have to be making up the difference if it cost more to ship the item and pocketing the money when it is less.
Undoubtedly you'd have to be required to create your shipping labels through Mercari because if you took the item to Office Depot or somewhere else, you would pay the retail rate that everyone pays for the weight and size of the package.
Sites like Mercari, Ebay, Amazon, etc. can not set the rates that ANY carrier can or does charge. They simply do not have that power.
I agree that the cost of shipping is getting crazy. And USPS raises their rates again in about 10 days.
Any site that offers shipping earns a commission on what they sell. I'm not sure why anyone would expect anything less. Corporations are in business to make money. If they offer you a service, they will make money off of it and that is the good old American way. They have no responsibility to offer anyone a service and then not get paid for it. That would mean they lose money on that service.
All sites that offer shipping such as Ebay, Amazon, stamps.com, pirateship, etc., they all make money off the shipping labels they sell.
Just as a footnote here. Taking your packages to someplace like Office Depot to ship them is to pay full retail. When you are shipping an Ebay item, it is much cheaper to create your shipping label in Ebay as the rates are much cheaper that full retail.
@isaiah53-57 wrote:
@mam98031 wrote:
@marybuttonlady wrote:I used to make about 20K a year on ebay, ad 12K on Amazon, but with the unfair return policies (aka they lie and we the seller pay) and the fees structures completely out of control, who can afford to sustain a presence on ebay, anyway I sold 636.00 on ebay in 2022. I could not afford to [ay to list everything, and I can not afford to pay 22% or more to ebay for each sale, then pay the enormous postal fees, and product storage, and shipping, I used to happily pay ebay 1,000's per year, but their greed and foolish updates while chasing Amazon has ruined a great gig.
Ebay doesn't have any category that has a 22% FVF, unless you are using promoted listings and the additional FVFs that you decided to pay get you up that high. Otherwise you are looking at Ebay fees incorrectly.
The OP is concerned with and talking about the percentage she is being charged of the items selling price in fees and rightly so - Its the only number that matters - The smoke and mirror of 12.9% of the entire sale including sales tax and shipping mean that you are likely paying 20% or more of your items selling price in fees - And thats a bare bones sale, likely not including international fees, promoted listing fees, optional listing tool fees, etc etc. that can run fees up close to 40% of an items selling price - like the @marybuttonlady posted, "Its out of control" and do you think its gonna get better or continue getting worse?...
And this is where some sellers make a mistake. The cost of Shipping is NOT part of what should be considered since this is not something Ebay keeps. They send that money off to the carrier. It certainly is a cost of sale [COGS], but not a fee charged by Ebay. So no smoke and mirrors here. Every seller should know there is a price to pay to ship an item wherever it needs to go. As well as these prices are controlled by the carriers NOT Ebay.
The Ebay FVF plus the cost of shipping is NOT the "bare bones [of a] sale". If the seller purchased the item, then that belongs in figuring the COGS too as well as shipping supplies. There will be other costs too.
Promotion fees is an option tool offered by Ebay and sellers do not have to use it, but if they do, the seller sets the additional fee they are WILLING to pay Ebay if the item sells. International fees only happen if the buyer is an international buyer, so that could add 1.65% in FVFs to your FVFs charged by Ebay.
Much of the fees you cover in your post are NOT out of your control, you just likely feel it is as it can get overwhelming at times.
In some categories Ebay has raised fees in the past few years, but in the category you sell in they have not. We have been pretty stable in that category since before the pandemic.
