Our MD has asked us to look into setting up an eBay store as another outlet for sales.

But looking at eBays seller rates is seems that the profit margin will be next to sod-all to non-existant.

Do ebay offer better margins for bigger sellers or is it one rate for all?

There are loads of companies who have eBay store so they must be worthwhile. Or do they work on tiny margins but hope to sell a lot?

Any links would be good too.

Cheers

bump for the afternoon peeps!

You can get a discount, but it involves lots of hoops and targets.

IIRC the biggest discount band was 30%, however that was when I last qualified for any discount, but they’ve since changed the seller panel so you can only see the next discount band you can achieve, which for me would be 15% if I could meet their new dispatch requirements.

Over the past year, they’ve been changing things to have similar requirements to Amazon’s Marketplace, however I’ve got no idea how the costs compare as I’ve never looked.

I know quite a lot of sellers who price things more expensive on eBay than on their own websites, then ensure they have suitable mentions of thier own website. Ebay’s big advantage is it opens up a huge buyer base, however it comes at a cost, but that cost is still alot cheaper than if you had to pay someone to build/maintain a website.

I’m sure a google search should turn up the current discounts along with requirements.

Ebay’s big advantage is it opens up a huge buyer base, however it comes at a cost, but that cost is still alot cheaper than if you had to pay someone to build/maintain a website.

^^^ This, mainly I’d guess.

Plus maybe people feel safer paying via a well know site, rather than giving your credit card details to any random site someone in Russia has set up.

We’ve got an ebay ‘store’ and a separate website, all transactions are done through paypal and our prices are higher on ebay to take the fees and ebay-specific chew into account.

High volume sellers get a larger discount but I don’t know what the numbers are, sorry.