Ebay Problems

• Listing Fees
  Every time you list on ebay, it costs you money. Ebay also charge fees for selling items (final value fees) but the listing fees hit harder as they are not taken out of sales, but are just costs for no net gain. If you list ten items, and only one sells, you could find that any profits are taken up by the fees involved, so you are working for less than nothing. One way round this is to take advantage of ebay cheap listing days by bulk listing, and we can help you with that. Or you could try using an eBay Shop which has cheaper fees. Again we can help set up something appropriate for your business. Please contact us for more details.
• Items sometimes sell cheaply
  There is a myth that ebay will give you the 'market value' for any item. In fact ebay might get somewhere near a 'market value' for items for which there is a high demand and plenty of buyers. But for most items, ebay is a far from perfect marketplace, where potential buyers drift in and out and the same item can sell for £10 one week, and fail to sell for 99p the next. Our eBay Selling tips might help you here.
• Competition is fierce
  Although you have access to millions of buyers on ebay, so do half the people on the planet. For example, The UK site has recently been flooded with listings from China which have hit many UK ebay businesses very hard. If you are in a business like this, which is finding it hard to make profits on ebay, you may be better off setting up your own website where you can explain the benefits of your business, rather than simply competing on price which is the driving factor on ebay.
• Ebay can be risky for buyers
  When ebay was small, it was a genuine community, self-policing (by community members reporting other members who broke the rules), and a reasonably safe place for buyers. There are now thousands of highly sophisticated scammers on ebay who make a fast buck from the unwary, then move on. They break rules with impunity, knowing that if they list thousands of items, only a tiny proportion are likely to be removed. This is a reason why many ebay sellers are considering setting up their own website. We can help set up something appropriate for your business. Please contact us for more details.
• Buyers ask questions
  Ok, this isn't much of a problem, but be prepared to answer many questions which are covered in the listing (condition of items, cost of postage and so on) as well as some that are just plain crazy. We once advertised an old annual that had some pages missing, but was very rare. We had a request to 'photocopy the missing pages' if the bidder won the item. Hmmmm. We have also had a request to list all the alsatian dogs pictured in a book in case they were relatives of the potential buyer's dog, and another buyer who wondered if we had a VHS recording of a wedding episode of Crossroads, filmed in Birmingham on the same day as her own wedding. All in a day's work on ebay...

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