ANYONE who has sold items on eBay in the last couple of decades will have witnessed a stunning example of corporate greed to feed shareholders by thoroughly screwing users of the website.
eBay used to be ‘fun’, casual marketplace with a global reach where you could bid on auctions for just about anything imaginable, and other things besides, inspiring Weird Al Yankovic to one of his greatest hits.
For buyers its usually been a good deal (beyond the scams throughout the years), but for sellers it’s become a case study involving unfettered greed of epic proportions.
eBay and Paypal Monopoly
One of the most damning elements of eBay was the fact that PayPal became a required payment system at one point when eBay bought PayPal.
That created a bloated cash cow, because nearly every eBay purchase ran through PayPal, meaning users paid for items or sold items on eBay and then the money flow was monopolised by flowing through PayPal as well, so on top of eBay fees that eBay made, they also made money from PayPal fees.
Monopolies in business are not supposed to happen given regulatory bodies are meant to prevent them, but of course that doesn’t usually make any difference, like banks investigating themselves for fiscal misconduct…
Somewhere along the line eBay and PayPal stopped being conjoined auction twins, and eBay switched to a different money-pal in 2020, presumably which would net them even more profits.
An Example of an eBay Sale
Given that eBay has no real rivals yet as a global auction site – although finally there are emerging websites – they do what any self respecting corporate behemoth does with a captive market: they rip off their customers and users.
I sold an item for £225 recently.
eBay charges sellers fees at 10.66% meaning £24.09 is swallowed up by eBay immediately. For simply hosting a webpage on their site… this isn’t Bonham’s or Christie’s.
So at this point the seller (me) is getting £200.91.
But that’s not it yet!
For an inexplicable reason, I also have to pay an International Fee of 1.8% because the buyer is in America. Goodbye another £4.07.
It’s the equivalent of a cashier making up an arbitrary fee in addition to the item when you buy something in a shop
At this stage you’d think eBay’s cake covered face would be satisfied with that. Nope.
There’s also a £0.25 Fixed Price Fee which you get charged if you sell an item in a non-auction format.
Finally, eBay must be full after gorging on all that?
Hold my tax percentage.
In addition to total sales fees of £28.41, there’s also VAT to be paid on top of that. Yes, somehow on this second hand sale eBay is charging me the seller VAT…
Say au revoir to a further £5.68.
Total money charged by eBay on one item: £34.09
That’s a total percentage fee of 15.15%.
It’s disgusting.
I could be wrong but eBay never had VAT involved in sales unless the item sold was new. Now you have to pay VAT on second hand goods regardless.
You also never had to pay a fee on postage costs, yet another disgusting play by eBay to rake in more money.
What Makes eBay So Greedy?
Well, beyond the obvious mechanisms of human behaviour the most repugnant aspect of eBay is that the fees they charge sellers is so out of proportion to the service.
eBay has been around for over two decades. All they do is provide your item with a web page.
That’s it!
Their overheads are web security and IT and the website is still somehow shitty to use.
Tragically, given the amount of scams that eBay allows to perpetuate through their website, eBay themselves have become the scammer charging exorbitant seller fees and additional add-ons that are so grotesquely out of step with the service provided it’s a shining example of abysmal practice in a business customer relationship.
Any given auction is the equivalent of renting you a room.
But eBay isn’t happy enough to charge you a disproportionate fixed fee for staying there briefly, they also want to shake you down for coins with additional made up, convoluted sales fees to fuck the seller even harder without protection.
On a final note, eBay facilitate scams through their website something I’ve covered previously, and when told of a scam I’d had pulled on me, they didn’t care at all about the loophole that I explained to them.
Wall Street the movie really did a fantastic job of characterising the capitalistic sociopathy that runs rampant in society and that was back in the 80’s: “Greed is good”.
eBay and many more live by that. And shareholders are part of the problem, but that’s a story for another day.
Meanwhile, the buyers are the real winners on eBay, while the sellers get shafted. Like every supermarket does to the people who provide the goods for them to sell then.
LionAroundWriting 