I don't usually take to a blog to rant about how much I dislike a service, but my normal social media channels wouldn't accommodate the lengthy complaint I hoped to write. You see, my mother had a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, the latest generation as of this writing, that she had purchased in August of 2014 and barely used since then. She decided that it would be better if it were sold. Naturally, to make the sale, I turned to my old favorite: eBay. That was a mistake.
After reading through the fees that are associated with selling on eBay, I regretfully agreed to the 10% final listing value fee. Thinking all was good and well, I placed the Surface on eBay. A week later, it sold for $750. Subtract the 10% fee and I was looking at about $675... but when the money finally hit my PayPal account, I only saw $727.95! Apparently, there is a second fee to use the "preferred" method of payment, and it was around 3% of the final listing value. After calculating for shipping costs that include insurance and packaging materials, the net sale was below the $600 mark...
Moral of the story: eBay is not worthy as a selling platform. I am going to look into Amazon, Etsy, and other competitors and see how they stack against eBay / PayPal.
