Personally, I don't care about their fees. I think anyone should have the right to ask for any price they want to ask. I don't care much for the only PayPal for payment policy. That is unrelated to selling an item, new or used.

I sell stereos to adult foster home residents with a $5 a week ALLOWANCE...installments. On the other hand I simply emailed an Criagslist ad for Pioneer CS-A33 speakers (1968 or so) and mentioned that I had all the parts except for the cabinets and it turned out to be a friend I had sold to a few times and he GAVE them to me!

Anyway, it's somewhat of a hobby and I'm used to being Woolworths. I found eBay to be too many fees before mandatory Paypal and I didn't have enough products to keep me going when my two best items weren't going to sell so I got out of selling and the person from eBay told me he's be glad to waive the fees because he admired my buyer's record (which IS pretty darn good) and I got out okay.

I got CALLED because he wanted to make sure I understood (yes, the OLD days)!

I haven't ever had Paypal and others have helped me since the switchover. I still send a thank you when I get the item via the helper (they don't/won't/can't send directly anymore (even if it's a gift?) which I think is about Paypal but could be related to something else entirely.

eBay does NOT own Craiglist. They took a 25% stake in CL when it needed cash. eBay promotes it's own Kijiji or whatever, not Craigslist. To promote CL would be in complete conflict with their own business model.

I'm not against eBay either. I do get to hear the complaint from every forums site that has a base in selling or buying with eBay.

100% of them covers it.

That's because eBay bought Paypal a long time ago, owns 100% of them and wants to utilize it's services to the maximum they can. I'l been a few years since the policy was initiated (3? 5? I can't recall unless I look at my feedback record).

So far there is nothing illegal about it and you can use a credit card to pay Paypal. It's like S&H green stamps...only green stamps worked, no others. So far as I've seen you are not able to deposit funds at Chase to deposit at US Bank or Key.

It was not a monopoly to require X type of wax cylinder or a certain spindle type for a recordable phonograph disk. Many companies have sold product specific items without an aftermarket.

Tying eBay-Paypal to some monopolistic plot doesn't fly. It's got a lot more to do with management. And of course the fact the sellers are under much more scrutiny then buyers who can petty much twist it to high heaven if sellers don't pay attention and keep their edge.

You've been seeking a static field of play but it ISN'T. The Alisher71 incident changed everything.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...2083l2-4.3l7l0

That about sums it and any further and it would be banished to P&R perhaps.

Actually, that is still being decided by the courts.

And on a side note, I believe ebay US is the only site that requires Paypal. The UK and Italy sites allow other forms of payment. Maybe the US needs to change their laws.

The fee structure does have an effect. I yesterday won auctions for some random parts.
I was the only bidder on a few, had competition on one. I sniped, it is the only rational thing to do as a buyer unless you HAVE to have it, and feel a bid needs to be in the system. The fees stated by the seller were not modest but not killer, the seller did explain the new ebay fee schedule. He is open to local pick up. I got a shipping discount as I won 3 items in a 12 hour period.
Did the high shipping kill off the potential buyers? Probably, the items often went for more. They ended at a good time for the seller strategy wise.
Will it change the sellers attitude about ebay as a market? I will ask.

Times are a changing. As a potential seller, I think a buy it now set up will end up being an increasing trend. Ebay's set up, snipe programs, are all pushing things various ways.

Speaking of sniping, another auction site I know of will extend an auction for 5 minutes if a bid is entered in the last 5 minutes or something like that. Effectively stops sniping in the last 30 seconds. If I ever add Auctions to the VeloBase Marketplace, that will be an included feature.

I thought ebay also included that end time extension if there is active sniping.

And in a not directly related aspect to the ebay, last night I got a check in the mail from some settlement against ebay about transactions that happened between 2005-2009. I don't know much more about it than that, I had nothing to do with the lawsuit, don't know the details, don't even recall the letter they stated that I'd recieved last January about the issue. The check is for 80 cents, and I'm sure it has some sort of stipulations attached to it stating something to the effect that if I cash it then I accept the term of whatever the settlement details were, and which since I have no idea what those terms might be I think I'll just staple the check to a wall in the garage and forget about it. I'm also fairly certain that the lawyers got a whole lot more than 80 cents out of the settlement. Anyway, if you sold anything on ebay in that time frame then you also might have a check on the way to you if the item you sold was in the proper category (car parts or something like that, don't recall exactly) .

oh well, back to the grind stone for me while I've still got a stone to grind (metaphorically speaking)

I like the fact that eBay's auctions end at a specific time. If that weren't the case, couldn't a black hat write a simple script that would endlessly bid up an auction or, worse, a block of auctions? That could be a huge headache for buyers, sellers and the site owner.

On a separate note, does anyone know if it's even possible on eBay to avoid shipping items to overseas customers? There are U.S.-based proxies that allow overseas buyers to get around my "I only ship to the U.S." restriction. I have this restriction in place and yet I see that my items can be bid on in Japan -- which would be okay IF I only had to satisfy the U.S. proxy, not the overseas bidder.

I am not touching this thread.

Moderators, you can relax.

Legal requirement. They care about litigation.

Nope. Their published policies on that have no basis in reality.

I gotta get off this topic. It makes me google "homebuilt thermonuclear devices."

Well, you all can bad mouth Ebay all you want, but I just yesterday received a .17 cent check from them for some type of over payment in 2009. Now that's a company who cares about it's users. LOL

Whoa, Robbie has the "second sight"... watch out for Robbie! :D

How many times have I told you, those 900 #'s are NOT eBay!