Ebay Will Be Raising Fees Again And Hitting People Selling Cheap Goods

Oh! No! How could anybody have a positive ebay experience.

As a collector ,I use ebay to sell excess material .I have been buying better material and sold off the less stuff between 2003 and 2010. Now just buy at major auctions ,a few collections and a junk lot to play with each year .

ebay has been running full page ads in Linn's lately, so they definitely still want the stamp business, though perhaps not the nickel-and-dime variety. I think Amazon has eaten their lunch on standard commercial products so thoroughly that ebay knows they need to increase collectible sales, where Amazon doesn't really compete.

Love the traffic on eBay-hate PayPal and its rules. Now if my $100.00 items would sell I wouldn't have to list them all the time-

Actually, the stamp featured in the Linn's ad, which appears to be US Scott 1393, is a penny-value stamp. Of course, the 'bay's ads about stamps always have been tone-deaf. The fact that this one is so wrong, even after an ebay rep appeared in and commented in this forum, speaks volumes about how little they know about this business.

Agreed. My biggest pet peeve about ebay's stamp listings is that there aren't nearly enough sub-categories. For example, the entire German area is lumped into "Germany and Colonies" and usually contains around 150K listings, making browsing difficult. Same with France and Portugal, etc. The German area on ebay Germany is split into dozens and dozens of sub-categories, making browsing specialized listings much easier, but of course everything is in German and listed by Michel. I'd shop there more often, but many sellers won't ship to the US and of course you have to hope your shipment makes it past the thieves at the inbound NY customs office (which is probably why many German sellers won't ship here).

I decided some time ago to use tracking and cardboard mailers to protect stamps. That alone makes a base cost of about $3.50. Then add 2.9% +.30 for PayPal and 6% for ebay (basic store) and I'd lose money selling anything for a total cost of under $4. What that means is that I can't sell most stamps individually. What I do is group stamps together - sometimes complete sets - sometimes stamps that have something in common etc. I'm still then left with thousands of unsellable stamps. I sell those as remainder albums and they do alright.

At the end of the day everything gets sold and though the overhead of working with ebay is high, considering the amazing distribution they give me selling to the four corners of the world (I actually only sell to the US) - I'm not complaining. I turn a small profit and that's really all I ask for. I honestly don't see any alternative. The other platforms are nice, but don't have the reach to the market that ebay has.

RISNY - Agree with you 100% , I also sold a lot of material back between 2003 and 2010 I cleaned out many boxes of material especially duplicates and stuff that didn't fit into my collection . Lots of work selling thru ebay but it gave me the ability to buy a lot more that fit my interest.