I want a reasonable online auction service that doesn't rake me over the coals on fees and play games with money.

I sold a set of golf clubs on eBay last week. The final value of the sale was $237.52 + $14.99 shipping and handling for a grand total of $252.51.

eBay insists that all payments go through Paypal (a subsidury of eBay) where there are additional fees over and above the final value and insertion fees charged by eBay. So there is a credit processing fee right off the top.

This is robbery.

Most retail sales companies are lucky if they can net something less than 10 percent profit while eBay is, by using their monopoly position in the market place, seeing a whopping 17.568% of the gross sale. This is not only predatory behavior, but grossly unfair to their clients. There has to be something unlawful about a company that double dips on the fees the way that eBay does.  And these jokers think that they are somehow being gracious by not charging me an "insertion fee".

Just think, with that so called "insertion fee" the net to eBay would be over 20%. Thanks for using the lube, guys.

As I said in a previous post I have used eBay for number of years...and will likely use them still. Sparingly. But there doesn't seem to be a way to tell the PTB in the high offices of eBay that what they are doing is wrong. I will tell you one thing, as soon as something better hits the market I will dump these pirates like a healthy crap and never look back.

eBay Fee Calculator :  http://www.rolbe.com/ebay.htm