PastTimesVintageClothing-Online Sellers Blog

Selling on multiple venues you run across a lot of varied
Fee's.

Some are reasonable, Some not so much for what you get
for them.

Of all the places I sell vintage Clothing the one site
that takes the biggest bite on fee's is E-bay.

Example:

Sold a Christian Lacroix Blouse for 18.00 on auction over
there.

The Basic insertion fee was .25 for opening bid of 9.99.
The fee for gallery plus which enlarges your gallery picture
was an additional .35 Cents

When the blouse sold for 18.00 Ebay took out 1.58 in final
Value fee's plus an additional .82 Cents from paypal.

Thats a total of 3.00 in fee's on an 18.00 item

Now take off the 3.00 paid for the item.

Then take off the cost of every other item you list as
being unsold because the sell thru rate is about 50%
now for a lot of the sellers. (You can get the official
sell thru rate from trackers of it, its about 40% to 50% )

So for every item you list to sell one doesn't and your
still out the listing fee on that item too plus the
cost of the item.

Now you could list for a .99 cents opening bid which is free
on the insertion scale cost.

I tried that and the items only sold for .99 to 2.00.
I don't want to Lose money and work hard!

Sell an item for 9.99 and its an even worse case scenario.
Insertion .25. Don't bother with enlarged pics.
Closing fee of .87 cents and then take some out for
paypal fee's and the cost of the item. Garage sale
would net you better profits.

Now I'm an E-bay old timer and The old E-bay had lower
Fee's and auctions Were shown in the order they ended.

Your auction was floating across the first page with just
minutes left for a buyer to bid to win it.
Thus their were bidding wars that could drive up the
final sale price depending on how badly someone wanted it.
Exciting and Fun, I truly miss it!

Now its a new system called best match and your items
many times don't reach the first page to incite a bidding
war and sometimes just not much interest at all.

So why do Many Sellers still sell on E-bay if the fee's are
high and the sell thru rate is low.

Great form of Cheap advertisement.

They still have a huge Number of people looking around for
items and Even if an item sells low and the fee's are
ridiculous you get your item seen.

Now I've Heard of Sellers including Fliers for their web
sites and a list of other places they sell when they ship
the buyers item. (Probably not true though because E-bay
Would frown on that and Sellers don't want to incite the
wrath of E-bay) .

If a seller were to do that though They'd get the word out
where else they sell like their own web site.
They'd give added incentives to buy the item on their web
site like free shipping or 10 % off.

Just Hear say though I'm sure!

Next Blog a little break down on ETSY Fee's and Yeah a
little preview on them.

Their cheap, Really cheap on fee's and Its pretty much what
E-bay Used to be to a seller.

Friendly, sociable, Fun, Low costs, Set prices, Good profit,
and a generally great place to be!