eBay is waiving seller fees for new businesses to help shuttered retailers move online:
eBay is launching a new "Up & Running" program today that aims to help physical retailers move some of their business online if they've been shutdown or are struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of that program, eBay is waiving seller fees for new businesses to the platform starting today, April 2nd, through June 30th.
Along with the waived fees, eBay will also be giving new businesses a free Basic-tier eBay Store for three months (which typically costs $21.95 per month with an annual subscription). That subscription includes additional perks for sellers, like lower fees, discounted shipping supplies, and more.
[...] Lastly, eBay says that it'll be highlighting small businesses on its homepage to help promote storefronts to buyers.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:24PM
...drive the business completely into the ground. Relying on eBay for reputation? HAHAHA
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:29PM (11 children)
I'm sure there are a lot of individuals out there who would love to sell a few things to bring in a few extra bucks right now. But with eBay fees, sales taxes in some areas, shipping costs, packaging material costs, eBay's increasingly nuts seller rules, dishonest buyers, and so on, it just does not seem worth it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 05 2020, @04:02PM (8 children)
I've heard them called "Fee-bay".
And yeah, shipping costs are brutal. A cereal box sized package costs $15 to ship. I wondered how the heck the liked of Amazon can afford to give customers free shipping. eeh answer is that big shippers negotiate far, far lower rates. They routinely get 80% off the standard shipping rate. Strikes me as very unfair to the little guy who's just trying to hold an online garage sale rather than simply throw away all his clutter.
But that's another thing I learned when moving. Transportation costs are very high. If you're making a move that's more than a few tens of kilometers, it's often better to leave your old generic stuff, abandon it if you can't sell it quick, and buy new stuff when you arrive at your new home. When I was bouncing from place to place, my furniture was 2 folding tables, 4 folding chairs, and an air mattress. The rest of my stuff was 2 weeks worth of clothing, a few books, 2 computers, a few pans, plates and dishes and eating utensils, and some odds and ends. The bulkiest items were those horrible CRT monitors. Sure wish I had flatscreens then. As for the books, I would have dumped them too and gone with ebooks, had they been available. It all fit in a small hatchback. I tried shipping things from my old address to my new, but the cost was near the cost of just buying new items.
As for trying to sell your stuff on Fee-bay, not worth the trouble. You have to photograph and list all the items, and pack and ship whatever sells. Sell locally, and you at least avoid the packing and shipping costs, and also the time it takes to photograph everything.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @04:57PM (4 children)
There is a reason for this seeming disconnect.
For the shipping company, it is significantly less costly to drive an empty semi-trailer up to the loading dock of a large shipper, fill it with boxes already pre-sorted to various destination points in one go, and drive away than it is to collect all the misc. onezies and twozies that result from the little guy shipping their ebay stuff that sells. If for no other reason that not only did the big guy pre-sort everything, but there was no store front (i.e., rent, electricity, heat) and no counter person (salary, if even hourly) plus the capital cost of renovation to open the store front to begin with (yes, a one time sunk cost, but still a cost required before the first package can be accepted from the little guy) involved in picking up the big guy's packages.
The economies of scale of just having to pay one driver to drive a semi-trailer to the pickup point (and, note, the driver costs would be there for both big guy and storefront) load the truck, and drive away is why the big shippers can get 80% off what the little guy pays. The big shipper does, in fact, save the shipping company 80% or more of what would otherwise be overhead in collecting packages from the little guys.
If your 'locally' still involves a local website, you'll probably still need to do the photography bit. But the photographs are not hard provided one has decent lighting (and, outside on a sunny day often provides very decent lighting).
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Sunday April 05 2020, @05:07PM (3 children)
In small-scale operations the seller delivers the "cereal box" to the post office by hand. A semi-trailer collects all the packages from the loading dock. For some reason, it still costs $15 to post that cereal box.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @06:12PM (2 children)
The difference is that for the post office they had to have a retail store (rent, real estate taxes, electricity costs, heating/air-conditioning costs (sometimes part of the electricity costs), cleaning crew costs, at least one counter person to take the package and "enter" it into the system (wage costs, either salary or hourly, plus possibly benefits costs [health insurance, retirement, etc.] too), repayment of capital to renovate the empty room into a "post-office", etc. that all add to the bottom line cost for the small-scale shipper that drops off that cereal box in order for the final shipping carrier to drive up a semi and load the packages (where there's the truck driver wage cost).
For the Amazon (Walmart, Newegg, etc.) shipping that same package, the final shipper has only the truck driver wage costs to drive up the semi. There is no storefront being operated by the shipper to receive Amazon/Walmart/Newegg packages. No electricity costs for the store front. No rent or real estate taxes for the store front. No cleaning crew for the store front. No counter operator for the storefront. None of that, it is all gone.
So, compare these costs:
Small time shipper dropping off at store front:
vs.:
That's where the difference arises. There is a lot of overhead (every list item above "truck driver" in the storefront list above) that contributes nothing to the actual movement of the cereal box from point A to point B involved in having that storefront where the small-time guy can drop off that cereal box for shipment.
None of that overhead exists in the "pickup from Amazon warehouse" method. That's why the Amazon's can get 80% discounts vs. the small-time guy at the post office with the same size/weight cereal box. The small-time guy's payment has to cover both the actual shipping costs plus all the overhead that goes to having that store front open where he can drop off his cereal box. And it is quite believable that the storefront overhead could very well approach 80% of the costs the small time guy pays.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Sunday April 05 2020, @07:10PM (1 child)
$15 to deliver a cereal box is still entirely disproportionate to the expense of completing the service.
Compare the cost of posting a letter to the cost of posting the cereal. Both items involve similar amounts of processing. Both items share the overhead of running the shop front. Yes; the box is larger; but like you say, the lion's share of the costs is in the overheads, not the actual delivery part.
It's like the post office is stuck in the 1980's whereas the rest of the logistics business is in 2020. The post office is not incentivised to adapt and improve because they keep charging silly prices. As a result (at least where I live) other logistics companies have eaten their lunch. Then the post office has the audacity to raise prices because the amount of letters posted has dropped precipitously.
This is a direct result of blinkered thinking - of all the companies in existence at the dawn of eCommerce, post offices around the world were in an ideal position to pivot from "letters, and the occasional parcel" to a delivery powerhouse. They had locations placed exactly in the population centres. They had the shop-front workers, they had the drivers. Instead, they sat on their hands expecting their now-outmoded business model to keep laying golden eggs and cried poor when people abandoned them.
I suppose I have a bee in my bonnet over the whole logistics thing, and I am sour on everyone involved. From probably 2005, the world has absolutely been about online shopping - and that final mile is critical. Critical to companies to get their products to customers, and critical to customers to get products from companies. Of all the places we want to reduce friction it is in that final mile.
In case you think I am being too critical, here is how it is done in India [wikipedia.org]. Lunch is cooked at home in the morning and arrives at your workplace by lunchtime across town - still hot. The boxes get picked up in the afternoon and are delivered back home. This happens with such accuracy that mistakes are a once-in-a-lifetime event.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:03PM
Nice switch to a completely different argument there (cost of letter at USPS vs. cost of cereal box at USPS) instead of the original argument (amazon gets an 80% discount vs. the PO's cost for the same size cereal box).
Due to moving goalposts, good bye.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @05:02PM (2 children)
Selling locally, you always run the risk of being robbed, or even killed. Even eBay is better than that.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @06:26PM
a person is supposed to be armed like a grown man, instead of a slave.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday April 06 2020, @06:01AM
That's a pretty small risk compared to driving to the post office.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @06:22PM (1 child)
i don't sell much but i really only have issues with the seller fees and the sales tax. i shouldn't have to pay sales tax when selling from my home. i already pay property tax. fucking parasites.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday April 05 2020, @09:11PM
Yeah, seems like everything is taxed every way they can think of. One that really gets me and seems constitutionally illegal: a car is sales' taxed every time it's sold! Why hasn't anyone ever challenged that and gotten it shut down?
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday April 05 2020, @04:15PM (6 children)
Ebay could shock the world and allow alternate payments methods beyond their Paypal "unbank". In fact, I'm amazed that they are allowed to limit people who use ebay to a single payment processor, one which they own? or at least have a very strong deal with. That all seems very anti-free-trade. Let people use checks, money orders, and allow anyone to choose whatever escrow services they would like to use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @05:04PM
When eBay first started, you could use checks or money orders. It's only after eBay bought PayPal (or it was the other way around) that using only PayPal went into effect. Then the two broke up, but eBay still limits it to PayPal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @08:50PM
Well they split a while ago. Ebay has been trying to use an alternative but is still hooked on paypal. Probably not trying hard enough.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday April 05 2020, @09:14PM (3 children)
Maybe I'm missing something- most ebay items that I see allow for direct credit card payments, besides paypal.
While I'm here, what's the problem with paypal?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @12:04AM (2 children)
Peter. Peter Thiel is the problem with PayPal. Yeah, he split, too, but made enough money to be toxic, vampiric asshole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @12:51AM
Take the rich guy's problematic money! I can't even right now!
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday April 06 2020, @02:13AM
Oh yeah, that guy. From what I read, he sold his stake in PayPal, but maybe he's still involved?
I keep hoping/wishing/dreaming that money would not be such a huge factor in personal power. Like that a "justice system" would truly be just, and money would not be able to buy influence nor better lawyers.
Anyway, I'm not highly invested either way, but thanks for the info.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @05:41PM
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