Ebay Fees and What I did to avoid them

By Andre Mcghee

Ebay for some has become so apart of our day to day lives we don’t really remember what life was like without it. Did we just go to yard sales and swap meets? Was our garage and closets always full and overflowing with clothes and other stuff we didn’t know what to do with? I do indeed LOVE Ebay and can say over the time I have used it I have sold hundreds of things. I have also paid hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars in Ebay fees. Ebay fees have grown from reasonable to absolutely ridiculous over the years, and if you consider they own paypal (they also have fees) it adds up. They have changed things to cater more to big businesses and powersellers than to the average person. That makes it very hard to make a living via selling there.

If you are trying to use Ebay as a part time income or as a home biz then unless you have a lot of items that can make up what you will lose in fees then you are going to lose money. This is not to say that people aren’t making a living selling less items than your average powerseller, but that number of people that are successful at that is certainly small and rare. So I decided to do something about the Ebay fees that had grown out of control and the answer may surprise you.

I stopped selling on Ebay. And I started my own auction site.

That’s it….I wanted to make my own business on Ebay but there was no way to do that when they kept taking and taking and TAKING more profit. No im not recommending that everyone just start up auction sites cause that is extremely difficult to do. You are not going to beat Ebay. I already had a baby website and it was not a stretch to add an auction section to it.  My site www.baby-skim.com is a parenting/baby resources community and the auction section can be found here www.baby-skim.com/auction. By creating my own venue I am able to sell my products for free and my visitors became my customers and they too list items. Over time im hoping through word of mouth that my auction will get more and more people and build a new community.

Im not trying to compete with Ebay cause that would be silly…I made my auction site free of fees because I want people to see us as an alternative to Ebay….a much cheaper one at that. There are other auction sites out there and other ways to sell your goods other than using Ebay. If the fees are too much for you, don’t feel like Ebay is the only game in town. It’s the biggest and it’s the most well known but it’s not the only thing on the web. Baby-Skim, Craigslist, Yahoo Groups and many more places offer a free place to buy and sell items. So don’t just rely on Ebay look around and you’ll see there are more places to buy and sell than you think.

 

Andre Mcghee owner of Baby-Skim.com

Baby-Skim Baby Stuff and More Auction

 

 

 

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