RANT: Ebay – the greediest company in the world?

What an absolute shower of bastards Ebay and Paypal are. I’m all for capitalism but their greed almost beggars belief ($7 billion in profits for 2007). When you look at their sellers fees it’s not hard to see how they are pocketing so much…

For starters, take a look at their listing fees:

If your item is £0.01 – £0.99, it’ll cost £0.10

If your item is £1.00 – £4.99, it’s £0.15

For items between £5.00 – £14.99, it’s £0.25

£15.00 – £29.99, it’s £0.50

£30.00 – £99.99, it’s £1.00

£100.00 or more – £1.30

Not too bad, right? Well, no, until you add the final value fee:

Item not sold – No Fee

If it sold for £0.01 – £29.99, 7.5% of the amount of the high bid (at the listing close for auction-style listings) up to £29.99

If you item sold for between £30.00 – £599.99 7.5%of the initial £29.99 (£2.25), plus 4.5%of the remaining balance of the final selling price.

That’s upto £27.90 they’re taking!

If your item sold for £600.00 or more – 7.5%of the initial £29.99 (£2.25), plus 4.5% of the initial £30.00 – £599.99 (£25.65), plus 1.9% of the remaining balance of the final selling price.

Well, sky’s the limit here! And I haven’t even got to the best bit yet… Ebay are now insisting that every listing on their site has Paypal as a payment option. That’s right, you can’t even list on Ebay any more unless you offer Paypal on your auction. *cough* monopoly, anti competition *cough*.

So not only do they £27.90 off your £599.99 sale through Ebay fees, you then have to give Paypal another 3.4% (+ £0.20). In our £599.99 scenario, that’s another £20.60!

So a total of £49.50 in fees from Ebay/Paypal, almost 10% of the sale value!

Of course, Ebay/Paypal will argue it offers their customers security but that’s basically a lie, as anyone who has ever fallen foul of a dodgy Ebay transaction, and funded it through Paypal will tell you.
In case you didn’t know: if you pay for an Ebay item via Paypal and you don’t receive it, Paypal never give you back what you paid out, regardless of the ‘guaranteed upto £150/£500’ signs they show on the auction (the key word in their misleading statement being ‘upto’). The only sure fire way off insuring you won’t lose money when using Paypal is to fund the transaction through your credit card. At least that way you can make your card company issue a chargeback on the transaction (Banks can do this upto 120 days after a transaction) when Paypal simply can’t be arsed to help…