What is the point of an "insertion" fee?!

[edzzz_vinyl]

I just started selling on eBay a couple months ago (been selling on another site for years) and I honestly do not understand why eBay would charge an extra fee to list more items.  If those items sold, wouldn’t eBay make more money?  Wouldn't 10% of more actual sales produce more profit than a listing fee?  It seems really counter-productive to me.

[gew6463]

I see, sorry I missed that before. Have you thought of opening a starter store for $7.95 (month-to-month, so you can cancel without penalty) or $4.95 per month yearly commitment? You would get an additional 50 more listings that way (the extra 50 at approx 16 cents each, if my math is correct). It's a decent deal, and you also get perks like being able to put your store on vacation and such. So $7.95 for 100 listings, and you can cancel at any time if it doesn't work out. 

I understand that it is a bit frustrating paying a percentage on shipping costs. Honestly, if Ebay were to do away with that, IMO they would probably raise the FVF on each item to make up the difference. The other well-known site "A" (not allowed to name them here technically) charges 20%, which makes Ebay seem more reasonable to me. Many sellers just add in the shipping FVF to item cost. Of course, I know that may not be workable for every seller, and you know your particular product much better than I. 

[bigdeals.etc]

Selling limit and insertion fees are handled by different departments on ebay, they are not all related to each other. Seller Vetting dept handles limits, and I guess Billing?? handles insertion fees. Is it a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing? Possibly to a degree.

Regarding the whole noob thing, it's not as black and white as you describe it. According to ebay, there are many different levels of seller "skill". Just because you passed the first hurdle, doesn't mean there isn't another one along the way.

When sellers start to scale their business and hit milestones from hobby selling, processes can change entirely to handle a larger load. And that can affect your daily performance as you make the transition. For example, my selling limit on my primary account is 10 billion items. I know right, sounds ridiculous that they don't just label it as unlimited. But when I started some of my other additional selling accounts, they started at limit 10, then 50, and so on. I asked CS if they can just consolidate my limits together because they know it's me that owns those accounts. Agent said no, because they want to see if I am capable of handling multiple selling accounts first. So I had to pay my dues again just like everyone else. Now those accounts have limits of 100, 1000, and 10,000 I believe. And no, ebay wouldn't let me share the free listings between accounts too.

Oh one last thing. Insertion fees also allow ebay to sell store packages which throws in more volume of free insertion listings depending on how high of a tier you want for your store.