One huge reason for the complaints is that the eBay model favors eBay and its buyers, not the sellers. Look it up and you will see that one of the founding elements behind eBays creation is to cater to its buyers needs. Also note that the this model greatly benefits buyers by creating very aggressive competitive product pricing amongst sellers and forces sellers to provide value adds such as good service and swift or free shipping to set themselves apart from other sellers.

Looking at our books as powersellers on eBay, it became clear that after eBay was paid for listing, gallery, final value, & paypal fees, that much if not all of the profit was gone. Not to mention operational cost, like the time it takes to manage the end to end sale, shipping supplies, and the other elements required to sell on eBay.

Auction and sales management time is a big cost factor to consider but a lot of us don’t consider it at all. We don’t put a value on our time. Why not? There should be a dollar amount attached to your time just as everything else has a dollar amount attached to it in business.

I feel that the majority of eBay’s buyers are seasoned and know what they want and how to conduct themselves on eBay to get it. However, we found that a lot of eBay customers are high maintenance. Some are always seeking a deal, even if its on top of an already great deal that they could not beat anywhere else on or offline. I don’t blame them for trying.

Then there are the buyers with the lower feedback ratings that buy and don’t respond to your payment request for the item they bought until after you report them to eBay and they advise you that they were:

• Having surgery
• Attending a funeral
• Out of town
• Had a power outage and could not get online

Let me see, I think thats all of the most common excuses that I remember. Whats funny is, each person thought their version was original. Meanwhile I would look at their feedback ratings and notice that they were buying items and paying other sellers while Im being told someone died and having to track them down for a payment. Shameless, lol.

Anyway, my point is that it requires a lot of time to manage your eBay business and you should attach value to it.

There are a large number of people selling items on eBay that think they’re making money because they make a sell. That’s called generating revenue NOT making money. Your making money when you have something left after you have paid to list, completed the sell and shipped the item.

This is one of the primary reasons for my theory, which is that eBay can stick to this business model as long as they like and be successful. eBay boycotts and complaints and have been around as long as eBay has and every year eBay introduces an increase of some fee and justifies it with an excuse about something it must do for some reason that you cant confirm. See these fee increase dating back to 2001 for yourself; 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 & 2008. Thats something isnt it? Boy this Internet thing makes it hard to escape accountability.

One of the interesting things that I noticed about some of these fee increases, is that they were often made on the heals of a good earnings announcement. Go figure. I think its safe to say that, this cycle will continue.

Now I do feel that for a small minority of sellers, eBay is a great place to prosper for the long haul. The categories that I feel are the most beneficial for sellers are those:

1. Sellers who produce the product that they are selling – Some examples are, digital products like ebooks, software, how-to guides or manuals, candles, Ethernet cables, etc. This is because the cost of the product is time (you set the value) or very low when compared to purchasing from a distributor or other source.
2. Sellers who purchase in such large volumes that their pricing can survive eBays slice of the return and still turn a profit. I think this is a small percentage of sellers on eBay and certainly not the average sellers position.
3. Sellers that own other properties, whether brick and mortar or online, that have a need to move discounted or surplus products, that would otherwise be trashed, donated or sold in bulk and written off as a loss. Examples are returns, open box, refurbs, and things that just wont sell in your store, etc. (NOTE: We’ve found that items sell with ease on eBay that will not sell on our ecommerce site without lowering the price)
4. Sellers who sale collectibles – this one is variable on eBay but should be good for most of these sellers.

Today, we still use eBay in this role to sale our returns and items that don’t do well on our ecommerce site. This is a win win situation because these items would have been lost revenue if not for eBay, so we don’t mine paying eBay for providing a path for us to sale those items even if we break even or take a small loss on the item, its better than nothing at all.

Finally, we concluded that eBay is a good place for people seeking to get into ecommerce. Its a great place to get your feet wet and learn about ecommerce. However, after you learn the basics, why not brand yourself and take a fraction of those fees to promote your own online store.

2 years after leaving eBay and setting up our own ecommerce website, we increased our sales by 300%. A large part of this was because we reduced our operational cost and used those fees for marketing. We still offer Paypal and were happy to offer it. Although we found that a lot of customers off of eBay shop using Credit or Debit Cards.

Oxygen Media has become the first cable network to have secured an ad sold through eBay’s Media Exchange platform, reports AdAge.

Adotas says:

Being the first successful seller on the advertising exchange, Oxygen has sold a schedule for the third quarter to Intel for a reported six-figure sum. Previous to this, Intel had not advertised on the network.

Some were skeptical of this idea stating that it will commoditize Internet ad space. It possible that this industry will have no other choice given nature of the Internet.

Read more about Google versus ebay

EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the experiment proved that eBay didn’t need to spend as much on Google ads, which generally run to the right of Google’s regular search results.

Durzy wouldn’t provide dollar or percentage figures but said that eBay’s pullback from AdWords in the United States would be “significant.”

Google apparently has confirmed eBay’s return to AdWords.

Google spokesman Brandon McCormick confirmed that eBay returned to AdWords on Friday afternoon.

“Over the last seven years, we have worked closely with eBay to drive customers to their site and build value for their business and the business of their sellers,” McCormick wrote in an e-mail. “We look forward to a continued partnership.”

Read the complete story here

I realized I had a few things to say about how successful this technique can be, because I’ve used it.

Use eBay, Amazon.com and any other large retails website with a searchable database to not only price your inventory but to find out what the popular products are, how much competition exist, and opportunities for new products.

Read more about large retail competetive research here!

I am a powerseller on eBay. Been selling there since 98, although I dont give much time to it nowadays.

Now, eBay does offer several tools that are free for anyone to use. Visit eBay’s Seller Central There you will find a collection of FREE tools that will display most commonly searched items for the day, most watched (eBay bookmarked), trends and all other types of marketing research.

Also, if you own an eBay store, which will cost you a monthly fee, you are provided with search logs similar to awstats. This log provides you with a keyword report used to find the items in your store and your auctions in one place.

We used this to determine our most popular items, and the items people were seeking that we did not have. This is useful if you want to expand your inventory but dont know what to buy because it can be used to figure out what products to purchase based on what people are search for.

We actually launched an off eBay store using the most popular items as anchor products. Note these products had good profit margins so I felt that they would be good anchors for an off eBay store.

Worked like a charm. Those products are the most popular in that store for the first 9 months and those are still the most commonly sold products in our off eBay store. Although we do market those products using PPC advertising, they still sell themselves without advertising on an equal basis.

This same technique could be applied to any other large online retailer as long as similar tools are available. I also sale products on Amazon but at this time did know if they have anything near the toolset offered by eBay. Also take a look at the shopping comparison search engines like “Shopping.com” (owned by eBay), PriceGrabber.com. There are many others