Not sure if anyone has noticed, and micyou3 brought this to my attention yesterday or the day before I forget when, the fees are going up.

In the initial listing they're cutting down from, and I'll use the base price to start off with, if you start an auction from $.01-.99 it will now cost you $.15 instead of $.20. However everything else has gone up. I want to say the final value fee for anything that sells in between $.01-$25 is a bit over 8% which is up by around 3%. There are other fees that have gone up as well but folks ..... beware.

Ebay, as far as I can see, is really the main place to sell things. I can't say that I know of any other auction sites like this. I know they're out there but again I couldn't say that I know of another solid competitor to ebay at least concerning slot cars is concerned.

Cheers,
Xence

The Final Value Fee will indeed go up a great deal in February. They are increasing the FVF for $25 and under from 5.25% to 8.75%. My math says that's a 66% increase.

I had previously done the math on calculating the profit made on a typical slotcar. If you bought a slotcar for $20 and then sold it on eBay for $25, your profit, after paying eBay and Paypal fees was $1.95. And for that you need to put in the work to list the item, secure the payment, package the item and ship it. Subtract from that the fees you pay on the items that do not sell and you could well be losing money.

And that was before the fee increases.

Selling low priced items for profit on eBay is a very tricky business. It's great if you are trying to liquidate and don't care about your cost to profit ratio. But eBay is really not the place for selling low ticket items as a business.

Joe

What ticks me off the most about this, is that they sent me a message and an email all about how they are lowering the listing fees for us, but not mentioning the final value fee increases.

Lately I just use ebay as a place to trade in my slot cars, so I can buy new ones.

Unfortunately epay is becoming exactly that .... ePAY. I'm just selling things on there so I can support my addicti.... I mean hobby. I don't have any clue how someone could make money on this unless they sold in mass quantities. I don't sell enough high ticket items for this to be worth my while. There are other sites out there as well but I wouldn't claim to know enough about the other sites.

If someone knows of another site just so we can support our hobby without all of the stuff going on with ebay I'd be all ears.

Cheers,
Xence

What ticks me off the most about this, is that they sent me a message and an email all about how they are lowering the listing fees for us, but not mentioning the final value fee increases.


I too noticed this and thought it was a very sleazy thing to do. I think they may have made a passing comment that some fees were increasing. Certainly there was nothing to indicate that a large 66% increase was coming.

As I said, I have not used eBay to sell slots for a long time, except when I need to liquidate something or they run a listing fee special. You cannot make money on small ticket items. And maybe it simply isn't worth it to eBay to have a bunch of small ticket items; I can understand that. Certainly the fees discourage it.

I spoke to one large volume eBay slot seller and told him about how there is no profit to selling slot cars on eBay. He told me he thinks he loses about 5% on his eBay sales, but believes he makes that up with his off-eBay sales. That wouldn't be my business model, but if it works for him....

Joe

I believe that the fees increase is supposed to happen on the 22nd. I do believeI will either completely stop selling what I have on epay or I will, similar to grandcheapskate, wait for specials and specials only to sell my stuff. Getting dinged like this doesn't make it worth anyone's while.

I re-iterate my previous question. Does anyone know of another site where we can either trade, sell, give away.... etc... our slots without getting killed in fees?

Cheers,
Xence

*snip*

I re-iterate my previous question. Does anyone know of another site where we can either trade, sell, give away.... etc... our slots without getting killed in fees?

Cheers,
Xence

Yep, Check out
mrconey.com

I have buzzed around the site and it seems to be growing.
Check it out!

ok I'm going to start another thread specifically on mrconey.com and see what comes of it. I'm hoping that others can chime in with pros, cons, and whatever else.

Cheers,
Xence

I use it more for reference now. Haven't sold anything in awhile. Ahh, the good old days. :cool: rr