Ebay is rubbish

Have you ever needed something as much as you hated it?

What about medication? What about sitting for an exam?

Now, what about trading with Ebay?

I have been using Ebay since 2002 in Malaysia to get some good bargains. I've also used it to offload stuff that I no longer use and made good money from the service.

I'm using Ebay even more now that I've moved to the UK.

Ebay has grown from a humble online auction site into a giant conduit of trade now. Ebay has produced many self-made millionaire entrepreneurs from online trading. I would like to be one some day but at the rate things are going, it may take 250 years!

I noticed in my last 15 transactions, trading in Ebay is becoming more and more expensive. As a seller, I am charged an insertion fee to list an item. Once an item is sold, I am charged a final value fee. When the buyer pays with Paypal, I am charged a fee again. To send the item to the buyer, I have to pay the postage.

By the time an item is sold, 16% is sliced off your selling price just on fees alone. 20% with delivery. Take for example, I sold an equipment recently and this is how much was left from the sales:

Selling price: £27.98
Cost: -£19.00
Listing fee: -£0.50
Final value fee: -£3.21
Paypal fee: -£1.15
Postage: - £2.36

Profit: £2.26 (8% margin)

If you look carefully, I can very well make a loss had I made a sale of only £25.

Because of the exorbitant fees, sellers are now pricing their items more intelligently to include these hidden cost. With such "intelligence" behind, they have also risked pricing themselves out of the market. This means less attractive to buy from Ebay than from online stores!

Recently, I was looking to get the new Garmin Forerunner 405CX watch. It was selling for £241. It wasn't cheap at all! I could have bought it for £209 at the London Marathon sales!

According to the seller, the price was inclusive of postage for £28. Then I started questioning the rationale behind the price. What was this seller sending me with £28 postage fee?! A golden calf from Australia?! It's just rubbish!

If only some big names can compete directly with Ebay, I will be the first to vote with my feet! The problem is, there isn't any. Yahoo Auction is dead.

There is still hope though. I have started paying attention to Gumtree. Gumtree is the UK alternative to Ebay. It is more powerful than Ebay. Not only can sellers and buyers trade there, they can also use the site as an online community classifieds. In fact, that's where I found the place I'm currently living!

Selling things in Gumtree doesn't entail any fee. It is a medium for buyers and sellers to transact and agree on a method of payment. However, this lack of control can also be a bad thing. Without a governing body, abuse can happen more rampantly by those who are intent of doing so.

Of course, at the grand scheme of things, one can only question how frequent could these dodgy transactions happen anyway. Besides, common sense must prevail when we're trading online. If I can be so dumb to be fleeced in Gumtree, I can be just as dumb to be fleeced in Ebay in the same way.

If there is a risk in achieving 20% savings in sales by trading in Gumtree, I think can live with it. What I cannot live with is parting 20% of my sales to an institution that gets it payment from the effort of others and does nothing except providing a few kilobytes of virtual space to list an item. Ebay is just rubbish.