Is Selling On eBay Really Worth It After All The Fees?

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Is it really worth selling on eBay because of all the fees?

We sell the majority of our items on eBay and nobody loves eBay fees, but are they worth it?

You have to kind of look at different things in your business. Numbers are super important. Keep track of what you’re spending on inventory, what you’re making on the item, and then take out the fees and the shipping costs and is it worth it?

You have to do that evaluation in your own business. We can’t tell you that it will always be worth it because it depends on what you’re buying. It depends on your business itself.

For our type of business, when we’re doing higher profit, larger items, the reason it works is because we can’t sell those items as quickly as we can on the local market as we can on eBay.

We can find them in the local market and people are willing to take a huge discount because you don’t have that many buyers in the local market. When we’re selling it on eBay, yes we are having to pay fees, but it is totally worth it in our business model to be able to do it.

Example of eBay Fees

We’ll break it down and give you an example on a recent sale to show the fees, shipping and profits. Then you can make the decision if it would work with your business model.

We do try to crosspost on Facebook, but nine times out of ten, those items that are crossposted will sell on eBay. We can ship across the country with eBay which increases our market so for us it does make sense to pay fees and get more views on items.

The item we’re talking about is a commercial exercise gym similar to a Total Gym. It’s a piece of rehabilitation equipment and it’s heavy. We bought this on a road trip across the country. I paid $40 for it and sold it for $2,500 on eBay.

Is Selling On eBay Really Worth It After All The Fees?

This item is a little bit harder to find somebody who will pay the money. It’s not impossible, but a little bit harder to find somebody who will pay the money that this is worth. If they bought this new, it’d be $5,000-$6,000. We sold it for half of retail. eBay fees were $314, shipping was $347 and the profit was $1,800. Would that profit be worth paying $314 in fees? Absolutely. The guy who sold it locally only got $40 for it. But because we sold it to a larger market, we made $1,800 profit.

It definitely depends on what type of business model you have to see if it is worth it to be paying the eBay fees.

To us, it’s worth it. A lot of our items would not move in the local market for the same profit. We don’t typically have a ton of competition for our kinds of items, so we don’t do many promotions on eBay, but that’s another thing you can do with eBay.

eBay is one of the main search engines that Google pulls from for shopping, so if you put a specific model of something that you’re looking for, Google will search all over the internet and typically Amazon and eBay are the two main ones that will come up for that. We’re not paying to get our items on Google. That is where eBay is paying out that money for marketing to be able to do that and make it one of the high searches. If you have your own website, you have to pay to get it ranking. Not having to deal with all that marketing is worth it to us.