Ive seen discussions here before about peoples thoughts on BIN, Best Offer and all that jazz.
Saw this on the side of a page this morning:
So theoretically/legally (whether they do or not) eBay cant consider themselves and “auction” site anymore, right?
It should just plainly be considered a selling hub/classified style site.
Maybe this is why most sellers don’t understand the meaning of auction or best offer…
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Call them whatever you like, they’ll always be known as feebay to me
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Buy it now is usually the way to go when I buy too. I don’t like waiting days for an item to end and on auctions you never know what it’ll end up selling for. At least with buy it now you’ve got a locked in price that may be cheaper than MSRP or the market price.
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Playing a little devil’s advocate here. If ebay sells 10,000,000 items a year and 13% are auctions that’s still 1,300,000 items. Is there a bigger English site for auctions out there?
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If you’re the internet’s premier online marketplace, you can call yourself whatever you want.
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I used to list everything as auctions back in the day. But eBay has been pushing sellers to migrate to a buy it now platform for the last few years. Used to let you have a store and post auctions but then pushed everything to buy it now only. I’m sure there is reasoning behind it (financially) but it’s pretty bogus in my opinion.
Did anyone here ever do a lot of sales on Yahoo! Auctions when it was still a thing? I only used to buy from there when I was really young but I’m curious of how it was for sellers considering it apparently had no fees involved.
I was over a thousand rated on Yahoo Auctions and was really picking up steam. Then they started to charge even though they were still much smaller than eBay so I, along with many others, just went with eBay exclusively. This was in 1999/2000 somewhere. Soon after, Yahoo was gone.
Even when Yahoo was free, you could still pay to have your items higher in the searches which most of us did. This was also pre Paypal and I would get 10+ pieces of mail a day with cash inside lol.
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Feebay is etched into my vocabulary. How good would it be if we could create a well renownef selling platform for pokemon cards where the fees area respectable 5%
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Looking back even just a few years, Pokemon auctions on ebay used to be terrible… you had to expect a final sale value loss of at least 20-30% below BIN fair market on many cards if you wanted a guaranteed sale through auction. eBay has since resolved that problem though with their promoted trending and like-items algorithm. More buyers constantly searching for items has certainly helped auctions as well. I’ve mentioned it before recently but hardly anything gets missed on ebay these days. So that’s something to be thankful for I suppose
There are a few specialised sites that have tried doing low fee auctions, but you’re just not reaching a huge market like you would on ebay. In the end, there ends up being more sellers than actual buyers on some of these places. No joke.
You would need a huge company like Google to even try to be half as successful. I don’t think the fees are even that bad when you compare to places like Amazon where most of the time you have to compete against their own listings.
The fact that they charge people final value fees if they suspect you sold it off site is another one to add to the list of great feebay moves
I still believe that fee wouldn’t hold up in court. I’d love to see this hit Judge Judy.
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This. I wouldn’t be paying that fee at all. Unless you said in messages to the person, “Hey let’s do an offsite transaction and I’ll remove ‘x’ listing from ebay so we can both save money”, I don’t see them having any real grounds for charging that final value fee. But if there was no messages or no proof except for when you remove the listing and select “this item is no longer available” and they STILL try to charge… that wouldn’t fly lol. I’d be calling and bugging them everyday until that fee was removed.
Solution:
- list items at $0.01
- make it clear the listing is for an off-site transaction and anyone buying though ebay gets nothing
- sell items off ebay, pay the 0.01 penalty