Ebay effectively rasing rates 9% by charging final value fees on shipping!

[ShopratFab]

Important Ebay news that really hits home on Pachinkos!!

A big item in the upcoming Spring changes in April, Ebay is changing the final value fee structure to charge 9% commission on the entire sale, including the shipping costs. Ebay is trying to say will lower shipping costs to buyers so this is a positive to sellers, (I don't know how losing 9% more is a positive, I guess it must on Planet Ebay) Being many of the items I end up selling are pretty low cost or are really heavy, quite often the shipping cost will be equal to or exceed the sale price of the item.

So on a typical pachinko machine sale, Ebay has doubled your fees! Figure $60-80 and about $50-80 shipping, you are now paying $9.90 to $14.40 vs. $5.40 to $7.20 before. Or if you sell a machine at $20.00 and your customer pays $65 to ship, you just had to eat $8.10 vs. $1.80, add $1.70 Paypal fees, and Ebay just took 1/2 your sale. I know this example is a little more on the rarer side, but I have seem many a machine go in the $30-40 range that this still could end up being a sizable chunk of the net sale on a percentage basis.
And you have no way to offset that increase and it looks like Ebay has updated the shipping calculator to pass on your discounts on UPS so you can't make up the difference there, but I'm still trying to confirm this. For USPS, you definitely get hit with the 9%. Pretty much now need to figure a 20% total cost of sale loss.

Read all the details on the Auctionbytes web blog (recommend reading for all auction site news)

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y11/m03/i15/s00

If you have a machine you were thinking of selling, now is the time.

Maybe it's time to get the Pachitalk auctions working, or try Webstore instead.