Anyone here still use ebay and paypal?

otispunkmeyer

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If you do, why?

I just sold my old, busted MBP on ebay, fetched ?312! not bad

However I'm actually out nearly ?50 in fees... and what for? it never used to cost this much. Paypal took around ?10 for just receiving some money and then ebay charged nearly 40 quid in fees, most of which was a final value fee.

I hate seemingly arbitrary fees.A ?1000 item surely takes no more work than a ?10 item to sell, so why should the former incur much higher fees?

I think that might be the last time I use ebay to sell! the fees incurred are just extraordinary
 
I usually only use them for things that are under 50$ so they don't slam me too hard, but yeah, kind of sucks.
 
Last time i sold stuff i remember it stating quite clearly that they charge for the service, its how they make their money afterall.

it was like ?5 for a sale of my ?90 graphics card, wasn't that bad.
 
eBay fees for a 380? sell would be about 20?. Receiving money on Paypal is about a 3% fee, so about 12?. I'd say you got ripped off if you had 50 pounds in fees.



On the effort compared to the final sale price, yes eBay has not much more effort to sell an expensive item than they have to sell a cheap item. However, for a cheap item fees can not be high - else selling them would be pointless. As a result, more expensive items share more of the cost. It's not much different with real auctions or estate agents or whatever.
 
It still smacks a bit of over-charging though. I haven't sold on ebay for a long time, so that was a bit of a shock to discover the amount of fee's. I remember it only costing a couple of quid. In fact it costs less to advertise your car in the paper!! and they have to print a picture and a description to go with it and pay someone to layout the page.
 
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I do. It is still the best way to access the widest market for fairly obscure items.

Yeah, they charge fees, servers aren't free and neither is bandwidth.
 
I've never used ebay, but I've used paypal quite a bit to send money to people (mainly for small bits of art). I'm not very happy with their ethics sometimes, but I don't know of any other trustworthy alternatives, so...
 
I just used paypal to pay for something that was $5. It cost me $5.24. I'm going to miss that .24, now I have to get the 16oz coffee instead of the 20oz.
 
I'm fairly sure when I sold something on eBay, Paypal didn't take any money. Yes it was for only about ?20, so maybe there's a lower limit (although there isn't that I can find on their website), but that does suck. I obviously do have Paypal and eBay accounts, but don't use them much. My paypal account has only been used for buying/selling 5 items on eBay and 5 woot shirts. And I've had better experiences with eBay (yes woot and your 'its OK they're overseas - they won't mind if a measly T-Shirt takes 5 weeks to arrive!' Good job they're relatively cheap for UK prices).
 
I'm fairly sure when I sold something on eBay, Paypal didn't take any money. Yes it was for only about ?20, so maybe there's a lower limit (although there isn't that I can find on their website), but that does suck. I obviously do have Paypal and eBay accounts, but don't use them much. My paypal account has only been used for buying/selling 5 items on eBay and 5 woot shirts. And I've had better experiences with eBay (yes woot and your 'its OK they're overseas - they won't mind if a measly T-Shirt takes 5 weeks to arrive!' Good job they're relatively cheap for UK prices).

Paypal fees are 2.9% + 30?, 30? would be about ?0.19 so the fee would be about ?1?
 
I use both, but almost exclusively for buying. They've never taken any more than I paid for the item.
 
I have switched to using Craigslist for most things.
 
Paypal takes quite a bit out as fees, but it is easier to use their gateways and APIs for our store(along with coverage for chargebacks), rather than sign up for a merchant account to process and handle payments with the shirt sales we do.
 
I have switched to using Craigslist for most things.

This. Unless it is obscure CL is the way to go. Over here a MBP would sell easily.
 
This is very useful for me.

Things that are worth mentioning:
A student paypal account does not charge you fees, and regular paypal accounts do not charge fees if you switch the settings to "send as gift".
It's against the TOS to use this for buying/selling and using paypal with another website and not filling out the send money form yourself will obviously not let you set as gift, but if you were to lets say set it as gift maybe once a month I doubt a red flag would go up.
 
Craigslist has never really taken off here unfortunately, classified adverts tend to live on eBay or specialist forums.
 
I used to buy and sell on eBay for a long time, even using it at one point as a very nice extra profit source selling car emblems and badges I picked up from junkyards. I learned that clean, un-faded Saab badges are worth their weight in gold.

But, the fees kept climbing and I found on my final few sales that the eBay fees and paypal fees on top of that made the entire process counter-productive, so I stopped. I still buy on eBay occasionally but I stopped doing the car emblem thing and any sales I make are on Craigslist unless they start charging for ads on there as well.
 
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