General Forum

What really bugs me about Ebay is they charge a fee on the shipping charges not just the cost of the item.    That is just plain wrong.      The buyer ends up paying for it.

All on their own, Ebay has spoiled a good thing.

Yes, but back when they didn't charge a percentage fee on shipping, sellers were taking advantage of a loophole. They got the actual price through charging outrageous shipping. A $15.00 card would be priced at $.01 plus $14.99 shipping. Ebay just closed the loophole. So I'd blame seller's greed more than ebay. Not that ebay is totally innocent.

Ebay does have a shipping calculator. To be more fair, ebay should charge a fee only on shipping costs that are higher than their calcultor's estimate. Of course, then you'll get my recent problem. Being charge $2.95 for First Class Parcel and being sent a 49-cent First Class PWE.

Or maybe best yet, just a flat fee. No matter what the selling price or shipping charge.  Then any overcharging for shipping would lay squarely in the seller's lap.

I've never bothered to actually confirm it, but my guess is that they started doing that because they felt that sellers were finding a way to make more money by charging really high shipping and then paying for less postage while eBay didn't get any of it. But yeah, it's a pain in the butt. I try and keep my shipping to as low as possible (without taking a loss or not packing it well) but I do feel like I have to pass it on to the buyer, especially on things that don't sell for much.

I've had an idea bouncing around in my head that I've never acted on. eBay really has the setup to completely oblliterate Beckett if they were inclined. The main drawback to selling (a lot of) cards on eBay is that unless you do an auction, you can't charge less than .99 for a card. Which means selling commons and almost anything that isn't an SP is really not worth it because most people don't want to pay .99 for a card they can get for a quarter from Beckett (or maybe even .18 from SL). But Beckett (and COMC) aren't really a great option for people (like me) that just sell a few cards here and there but have lots of commons or oddball things that really aren't worth .99.
And even if a .99 sell point was decent for common cards on eBay, nobody but people that can afford to basically list a bazillion things every month and still make money even if a large percentage of them don't sell can really do it. The listing fees would eat you alive.
What I think eBay should do is set up some kind of adjacent collectbles store set-up that gives people the ability to put stuff up for BIN but have a lower selling price (.20-.30 minimum) that would let more casual collector-sellers list pretty much everything they want at more reasonable prices and increase the chances of having someone buy multiple cards at one sitting. I mean, I know it would be pretty enticing to me that if I bought some higher $ card off somebody that I could then go into their other inventory and pick up recent commons for maybe $.25 a pop.
What would be even cooler would be if we could form some sort of partnership with eBay to develop this store using the TCDB checklists to make it easier for both buyers and sellers to identify cards and also let sellers enter their cards using pre-defined lists and let buyers set up notifications/want lists for cards they are looking for.


Basically what I'm saying is that I want a marketplace with the ease of access and traffic of eBay with the collector tools here at the TCDB.

"Ebay does have a shipping calculator. To be more fair, ebay should charge a fee only on shipping costs that are higher than their calcultor's estimate. Of course, then you'll get my recent problem. Being charge $2.95 for First Class Parcel and being sent a 49-cent First Class PWE."

That could possibly be fixed by giving the seller the incentive to buy postage through eBay. If you are going to charge 2.95 for 1st class, then you gotta buy it through ebay and print the postage. If you mark it shipped without buying their postage, you can get charged extra fees.
Basically, eBay would take the information you give them (weight, size, your intended shipping level), calculate a price that is reasonable and give you the opportunity to purchase it at that price through eBay to avoid extra fees.
If the seller is really going to ship it using a .49 stamp, they should put in a shipping price of somewhere in the neighborhood of .49 (a reasonable amount of S&H should be allowed though)

 Around 15 years ago, I saw a great deal on a box of cards.     $4.99.     Then I saw the shipping was 19.99.    I simply did not bid.  The buyer has the hammer if he wants to use it or not is up to him.

If you do an auction format, you can start the bidding at $.01. But I'm talking about fixed price ongoing listings (more in line with a store). A fixed price listing can't be less than $.99

I've run across many of those myself. I know shipping prices and I know when somebody is gouging.

NJDevils wrote:  Around 15 years ago, I saw a great deal on a box of cards.     $4.99.     Then I saw the shipping was 19.99.    I simply did not bid.  The buyer has the hammer if he wants to use it or not is up to him.

Shipping Gouging has been going on for a long time at Ebay (the example of selling a $15 card for an opening bid of only $0.01 (or actually $0.99 since I don't think auctions can be set any lower unless by a Power Seller) with shipping of $14.99. I hate when sellers pull that junk. Like NJD said about a box of cards listed at $4.99 with shipping cos of $19.99. Most sellers have unreallistic shipping costs and a ton of them for individual cards will charge say a normal $3.00 shipping but send via PWE and actually only spend the $0.49 for the stamp. UGH! Sportlot sellers are a little worse as they normally do not (or don't know how to) combine shipping to a reasonable rate. Often times if I get 2 or more cards from one Sportlot seller and the shipping is $2.00 per card no matter what. You buy only one card and shipping is $2 you buy 2 cards and shipping is $4 buy 5 cards and shipping is $10. They don't seem to have a limit.