nile13

Essentially, the way it was before two days ago:

- Personal account. You can receive any payments not involving credit or debit cards free of charge. You can chose to accept up to $500 per month in credit card payments at 4.9% fee.

- Business and Premier accounts - You pay 30 cents + 2.9% for every transaction, no matter how it originated.

As of two days ago they demolished the Personal Account and now are charging 2.9% on everything related to any purchase, whether eBay or not. So there's basically almost no difference between the three account types.

One might say it's not much money. Well. let's see... You sell something on eBay for $100. You pay the insertion fee ($2), the final value fee ($4.82). Then you pay PayPal another $3.20. You just paid this company (eBay owns PayPal) a whooping 10%.

I would not be opposed to all this if it was clearly disclosed. It's not. Instead they tie your hands in a way that you can't really do anything else.

The newest great idea from them - you can not list an item without stating the shipping cost. How in hell am I supposed to do that if it's a bulky item and I have no clue where it's going? But they just don't care. "Put something in that will be more than shipping to the farthest point" (that's a direct quite from these geniuses yesterday on the phone). Do you really like bidding on $100 items with arbitrary $50 shipping? If the seller is not an a-hole he will, of course, charge actual shipping. But you as a buyer don't know that, he's within his right to charge whatever the auction listing says.

tj90

Thanks for the explanation. Unless you study it in depth, you never really know what you are paying ebay. 10% is pretty hefty and probably a reason why other people have soured on ebay (# of auctions are down I believe)

In regards to fraud, I bought some Fusion razors from ebay one time. They were stamped VONS on the back. Hmm - go to Vons store to investigate. It turns out that the store stamps the store name on the item so that it is stolen, the item can be tracked. Looks like I was the recipient of stolen goods.... That is why the stores are now putting razors in those plastic security cases. I guess people were coming in and clearing the shelves and selling online...