posted on July 4, 2001 07:18:29 AM
How can sellers expect to make any money at all by accepting PayPal payments on a auction that sells for $.01? Are these guys (girls) nuts?
Doesn't PayPal charge a minimum on a transaction using their service?
posted on July 4, 2001 07:25:55 AM
why is anyone listing an item at .01 on ebay ??
ebay wants to discourage low end items because it takes just as much resources for them to host low end items as high end items.
ebay also wants to discourage marginal sellers by asking for cc,bank acct,id verify,feedback ratings etc to reduce workload on their staff,
if you were running an auction,what would you rather have listed-item starting 0.01 or item starting at 99.99??
posted on July 4, 2001 07:30:24 AM
Thing about Auction with starting bids of .01
is that they tend to draw attention to your listings not just the .01 they come to see that item but they usually will veiw all your items.
.01 starting bid on a few items is a great low cost alternative to paying $99 for category feature.
also most .01 starting bid auctions tend to draw more active bidding auction with bid also grab more atteneion and rarely will the item end with a 1 cent bid.
the few cents you might lose one one Item you make up for in incressed over all sales.
if one or two .01 starting bids gets more incressed sell through you will still make a profit over all paypal fee is only .34 or so cents.
posted on July 4, 2001 07:33:20 AM
People who start auctions at one cent don't expect them to finish at that price. Neither do folks who start them at $1 (I've done that a few times). Given the right product, the price should climb nicely due to the extra exposure a one-cent or one-dollar auction brings.
posted on July 4, 2001 07:36:56 AM
I see auctions all the time in my field (Sportscards), in which, the items sell for a dollar or less. My question being, what would the fee be for the seller on these items?
Actually the resources any Item uses on ebay has little to do with any thing, ebay hosts NO PHOTOs no counters no templates only thing they host is the text of your listing.
The total amount of resources for any listing on ebay includeing bandwidth is well under 30Kb or 30,000bytes a byte being a letter coma any other text that you typed in your listing and title.
30 KB is enough resources for a writer of childerns book to write several books.
In order to even use 1MB of ebay resources and bandwidth you would have to launch over a 1/2 million auction weekly yourself.
even then the cost of the resources your useing of ebay would be less then $1 for ebay to host that many listing no matter what you set the starting bid or reserves at.
Ebay is not trying to discourage any listing at any starting bid they make there .30 or .40 no matter pluss FVF if it sells no matter.
Like phbroz ebay is concerned on one Issue thats profits ebay has grow so large and out of proportion they couldn't even afford there large payroll if they charged users $2 or $3 for every 1/2 million auction they launch weekly.
this is the advatage of the smaller Auction sites free or fee There size is smaller they have less help there over all cost to run the site is less then $2000 to $20,000 yearly.
Most of these sights as well only use resources for text as well photo's counter and the rest are all hosted outside there server they can run there whole auction site with in 100 to 150mb MB of HD space.
"In order to use the Service, you must register for a Personal, Premier, or Business account. If you use the Service for the purpose of conducting e-commerce on a regular basis, you agree to register for, or upgrade to, a Premier or Business Account".
