Starting an Ebay Business and Ebay Fees

In my last blog I discussed how to start an ebay home based business. In this blog, I will discuss a little about the ups and downs of Ebay fees. Lots of people like to go to ebay to bid on a product. They don’t really understand what the process is. They just like the great deals or the convenience of bidding on Ebay. From a business standpoint, however, Ebay charges fees to place what is basically an advertisement for your product on the internet.

First of all, to advertise a product on ebay, you need to sign up for an ebay account. That is a very simple process so I won’t go into that right now, but I will direct you to go to Ebay.com where they will walk you through step by step in creating a password.

Once you have your password, you can take a picture of any item you want to sell and place that item for sale on Ebay.

Ebay will charge you a fee to do that. There is a fee to list the product, fees to place a picture or pictures of your product, fees to have the listing start at a certain particular time, and fees that you will pay called final value fees which is a percentage of the cost that your item sold for.

The ebay fees were raised just recently and many Ebayers were not happy about that considering Ebay has become a very very wealthy company and it seemed unnecessary. But, once again, supply and demand come into play. Everyone wants what Ebay has to offer so they are king of the hill and more and more people are becoming addicted to listing items on Ebay for sale.

It is fun to list a product but the downside of this is the fact that when your listing doesn’t sell, you still have to pay those Ebay fees! If your auctions are not popular for reasons like your auction ending at a bad time of the day or on a bad day of the week, or it being overpriced, or there being too many of the same items out there, those auction fees can add up quickly.

For example, I may have just made a $15 profit on something that I sold, but I had 15 auctions that ended without listings and the average listing fee for each of those auctions was $0.75. Instead of earning a $15 profit, I just earned $3.75. Some days I will have all of my auctions close without a bid but I still have to pay the fees.

The going rate for ebay fees right now is as follows:

Insertion fees: These are charges for listing your item. For example, if you start your bid at .99 then you will be charged 20 cents to list that item. If you list your item between $1 and $9.99, you will be charged 35 cents just to list it. Here is the rest of the chart below. Now, if you sell your item, that is the next chart that follows. . .

$0.01 – $0.99

$0.20

$1.00 – $9.99

$0.35

$10.00 – $24.99

$0.60

$25.00 – $49.99

$1.20

$50.00 – $199.99

$2.40

$200.00 – $499.99

$3.60

$500.00 or more

$4.80

Let’s say that you sell your item that you had listed at $9.99 for $10.99. You will be charged a final value fee. Since it falls in the range of one cent to $25 you will be charged 5.25% or 57 cents. If your item doesn’t sell, you don’t have to pay a final value fee but you will still have to pay the listing fee.

Final Value Fees

Closing Price

Final Value Fee

Item not sold

No Fee

$0.01 – $25.00

5.25% of the closing value

$25.01 – $1,000.00

5.25% of the initial $25.00 ($1.31), plus 3.00% of the remaining closing value balance ($25.01 to $1,000.00)

Equal to or Over $1000.01

5.25% of the initial $25.00 ($1.31), plus 3.00% of the initial $25.01 – $1,000.00 ($29.25), plus 1.50% of the remaining closing value balance ($1000.01 – closing value)

Therefore, your $9.99 item that sold for $10.00 has cost you a total in Ebay fees of:

92 cents

Your item has been advertised and sold for 92 cents. Next time I will go into Paypal Fees. Happy Ebaying and feel free to visit any of my auctions. . . http://www.bestdiscountshoppingonline.com