Ebay's Final Value Fee on Shipping

This is just a little rant about Ebay. I decided to sell items to expand my stay at home jobs and I had high hopes about it before I sold and found out that Ebay is now charging a Final Value Fee on Shipping. I live in Hawaii so it’s usually cheaper to send bulky items using Priority mail boxes.

I was reading discussions about it and the explanations people can think of was because Ebay is promoting the “Free Shipping” feature and some sellers were taking advantage of the shipping not being charged by Ebay. For example, an item can be 0.99 cents and the shipping will be $20 for a small item.  If these are actually the reasons, I believe Ebay is not being so reasonable on the sellers’ part. Ebay will not pack the items, print the shipping label or drive to the post office. I consider these the handling fees. So if you are a seller and you charge the exact amount of shipping the post office is charging, you will lose money not only because of the handling fees but because Ebay is now charging a final value fee on shipping. The regular sellers will probably have to add these charges to their item cost.

Ebay removed the insertion fee which is the fee that you pay when you list an item. Before, whether you sell the item or not, you still get charged of the listing fee (considering you did not use a subtitle, buy it now feature etc). That was a good thing. However, now once you sold an item, you will be charged: Final Value fee on the item based on the amount for which it was sold, Final Value Fee on Shipping and Paypal fees.

I’ll stop selling in Ebay for now until I find another way to ship items cheaper.

All opinions in this blog post are mine. Picture was taken from ebay.com.