The Cost of eBay
I recently sold five items on eBay, and I thought I’d take a minute to share the numbers with you.
Here’s what I sold:
| Item | Price |
| Metroid Prime | $5.00 |
| Metroid Prime 2 | $9.99 |
| Metroid Prime 3 | $14.99 |
| Final Fantasy VII | $39.99 |
| Raging Bull: 2-Disc SE | $3.25 |
| Total | $73.22 |
Including my charges for shipping and handling, my total gross income was $92.22.
Not bad for five items, in my opinion. Everything was in great, excellent, or perfect condition, so, as people often do, I think things like, “It would have been nice to have gotten at least a hundred bucks for that stuff,” but hey: it’s no longer on my (already overcrowded) shelf taking up space.
Now, let’s watch the ridiculous happen.
| Expense | Cost |
| Postage | $17.81 |
| Shipping Materials | $5.65 |
| eBay Fees | $7.17 |
| PayPal Fees | $4.27 |
| Total Expenses/Fees | $34.90 |
Finally, subtracting $34.90 from $92.22 results in a final net income of $57.32.
This, my friends, is why eBay has completely lost the folks cleaning out their closets for Craigslist and other services. I’m not even going to try to figure in the time I spent taking decent photos of those things, cleaning them, posting them on eBay using their slow, painful web interface, and driving them to the post office to mail them. It would just be too depressing.
I’m sharing this mainly to warn those considering eBay for selling their old stuff that although it might sell, and if it’s valuable it might sell for a pretty penny (as did Final Fantasy VII in my case), you will eat fees and expenses left and right until you might as well have just given it away. Family and friends like free stuff anyway, right?
