Ebay "blackmail"?

[Simon]

Ebay now won't let sellers list items unless they offer Paypal as a payment method.
As Paypal and Ebay are one and the same company this STINKS. Under the guise of "making Ebay safer" they are not only getting seller fees from both the listing of an item and a percentage of the final price when it is sold, but also ANOTHER percentage of the final price when Paypal is used.
Does the OFT know (or care) about this?
I put in my listing "I do not accept Paypal" and the scumbags removed the listing! fecking blackmail, thats what I call it.

Simon

ok, rant over

 

[Ian Anderson]

Conditional selling

I believe it is illeagal in the UK

Need a lawyer to comment

Ian

 

[Simon]

Paypal is now a Bank and is used by several big companies around the UK. I wonder if Mr Al Fayed (who uses Paypal as the bank for Harrods) know that they are also the bank for the BNP? oops...did I say that out loud!:laugh:

 

[Ron Earp]

Old news in some areas of the world. Been like that for sometime, Australia since 2008 if I recall correctly. Big stink at the time. I'm not defending Ebay at all but it is voluntary to use Ebay and if you don't like it you can go to another auction site. There are alternatives that are pretty good, like Ebid.

Frankly, Ebay and their decisions on this particular matter are okay for me. I like PayPal, like the protection (not much, but some) that it offers and it makes the transaction seamless. I've been selling online since the late 80s (dial up bulletin boards) and I hate the hassle of personal checks, money orders, or COD. Done them all, many times. I'd prefer to pay a small percentage to PayPal and save myself a lot of time.

 

[Pete McCluskey.]

I agree with Ron on this, I use Paypal extensively and as yet have not had a problem.
And there are alternatives to Ebay and Paypal so the consumer still has a choice.

 

[Simon]

Ron, Pete,
I think you're missing the point here, I have used paypal in the past and despite their attempts to say that a paypal transaction is safer, I KNOW that they provide limited cover when any problems occur. It's NOT that I 100% do not use paypal, it's just that I am being FORCED to offer paypal as a payment method in any auctions I may run. I am not even allowed to state in my auction advert that I do not want to take paypal.
If Ebay had acted like this from the start, they wouldn't have got so big and powerful. Like all big companies, when they have a monopoly, they do as they please.
Like Ian says, "conditional selling" Ebay have cornered the market and are now manipulating it to make maximum profit from underhand practices.:thumbsdown:
Lets say for example I put an auction up for an item at a starting price of £30, It costs me £1 to insert the item. Lets say it only gets one bid and sells for £30, Ebay charge me 10% of the final price, £3. If I use paypal to accept the £30 from the purchaser, paypal takes a fee of 3.4% + £0.20 = £1.22. Not a huge amount I grant you, but that makes a total of £5.22 for ebay/paypal (remember they are one and the same company) from one transaction of just £30! With my limited financial knowledge, I make that over 17%!

 

[Ron Earp]

I understand what they've done and I understand why they've done it. To make more money. But there is Ebid.

If your fees are correct the Ebay UK site is making a killing. The US Ebay is not that high. I'm running 22 auctions at this moment, listed them last night with Turbolister. The US fee schedule for PayPal and Ebay is listed here:

eBay.com Fees

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees-outside&countries=

And there isn't any way to come up with 17%.

My typical insertion fee on a low money item (<$50) is around fifty cents. If it sells for $50 then Ebay gets 8.75% of the first $25, and 3.50% of the remaining $25, or $2.18 + 0.87 = $3.05, or 6% overall take. PayPal will then get 2.9% of the transaction bringing the total to 8.9%.

Sure, I don't want to give away 8.9% but for me personally I find the convenience well worth it. That said I sell on Craigslist any time I can and avoid the fees entirely.

 

[Mike]

Just for comparison, many Federally regulated businesses are limited to 3% on one side of the trade and 6% max no matter what. Upwards of 9% is obnoxious....and should be illegal. I'm with you on the users choice to use it or to go somewhere else, but on the other hand, those fees are not right.

My company facilitates transactions for individuals everyday, and the average take is under 2%. We still make a good living for everyone at our company. This isn't just our fee and there are other fees tacked on. This is the total charged to the customer for an end to end transaction before we pay our counter parties for their work. And yet we STILL make good money. 9% is obscene.

I have stopped using ebay.

 

[Ian Anderson]

Had a bloke come into the office today and he sells a lot of stuff on Ebay UK

I asked him, and as a "Power Seller" he says it is working out at just over 20% fees and charges for him and he is not overly impressed but accepts there is not much of an alternative.

So Simon your figures are not far our for rip off Britain

Ian

 

[Ron Earp]

I asked him, and as a "Power Seller" he says it is working out at just over 20% fees and charges for him and he is not overly impressed but accepts there is not much of an alternative.

That is flat out amazing that Ebay UK can even continue to exist. I begrudgingly accept the almost 9% we pay because I like the service, it sells things for me efficiently, and it removes the hassle of checks and money orders. People have a different threshold of pain for checks and money orders, mine is low.

But at 17-20%, no, I wouldn't use it either.

On second thought, I easily looked up Ebay's UK fees:

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/fees.html#Auction

The one thing that stinks is that private sellers will pay Ebay 10% of the sell price where as the US rate is lower. But your insertion fees are normally priced and the PayPal transaction fees are about the same at 3.4%.

Doesn't matter to me and I'm not trying to defend Ebay, just get the straight skinny. I wouldn't use Ebay UK if it was "only" 13-14%, 17%, or 20+%.