How hard is it to sell on Ebay these days???

[dreed]

The one thing I don't like about Ebay is their high listing fees and their final valuation fee. There is a new option to Ebay that also has an affiliate opportunity. It is called Big Value Depot or BVD for short. They are new and have not yet achieved the number of items Ebay has, but they sure are growing fast. Now they even offer a webstore where you can list a number of items free every month.

[slgideon]

Ive been selling on eBay for 7 or 8 yrs now, it cycles. I sell antiques and collectables and do well most of the time, but in order to do well I have to keep the number of active auctions high and add new auctions regularly. A lot of my business is repeat business so I have to always be bringing in new merchandise. It is very time consuming on a large scale and yes the fees DO take a big bite out of the profit margin.

[Angela123]

Update to add that I have sold several products at Tripleclicks

[ThisGal]

I'm a small eBay seller. I run about 20 items at a time. I don't sell a ton of stuff but do here and there.

The key for me is ONLY LIST WHEN THE LISTING FEE IS FREE!

You can list up to 100 per month and not pay a listing fee if it's a 7-day auction that starts at 99 cents or less. Then just make sure your shipping cost covers the cost of postage + supplies + fees.

Also take advantage of their listing promotions! Right now they have a promotion where you can list at any start price with no listing fee through July 12 (this is included in the 100 items per month).

So I never pay a listing fee. It'd be nice if I could never pay a final value fee too but I'll take what I can get.

[David95sh]

As a newbie to internet marketing,I found Ebay very hard to compete with some more experience user, and expensive to sell an make a profit on ebay.

[MayaBay]

I think Ebay is worth a try, but I'm a former powerseller who was put out of business after all the major changes in 2008 (I had about 10 different accounts, but I would consider myself a level 4 powerseller, not as large as the 10's). After that, Ebay's visitor base declined by about 30%. I was watching them on Alexa, while comparing their traffic to Craigslist. That year was the first time Craigslist matched them in visitor traffic.Ebay tried to blame it on the economy, but Craigslist just kept gaining visitors after that. All the changes they made forced lots of sellers to leave, and when they left, all their items listed left too. So Ebay lost a lot of rankings in Google as a result. The largest powersellers did better, because the new system puts them to the front of the line in search results on ebay. If you list an item and it's ending in 24 hours, it may not even appear on the first page of search results until the last hour or so, because powersellers who have items ending in 8 days may be taking up all the slots on the first page. The little guys have less of a chance of succeeding on there. If you look at the completed listings for most of the items on there, you will see it's very hard to sell now and make a decent profit. The fees are pretty steep now as well. Some people have found a niche, and if you can do that, then you may have lots of success on there, even as a little guy. But those people are far and few between. I still sell on there, but I only make about 10% of what I used to and it's probably my smallest source of income from the web. It used to be my main source of income about 2 years ago.

My advice is to give them a try. Just don't build your primary business on there or put too much stock in them. They can't be trusted and can put you out of business overnight with the slightest changes. While trying to sell on there, you should setup your own website and learn about Search Engine Optimization. It may take a little while, but once you have lots of visitors, it will be better than Ebay. Just make a professional looking website so people trust buying from it, or hire someone to do it for you. Use Youtube and resources like that for extra promotion.

[sashaisaboysname]

Here is a online calculator that will tell you the exact fees for paypal and ebay. You can figure out what you want to sell something for and input the info and it will give you the paypal fee, ebay fee and your profit so you can see if its even worth trying to sell. Ebay Calculator