It's a long time ago when I was really active as a seller on eBay ...
currently I am living a bigger town, and thought I make some use on my knowledge on bikes and get active on eBay again and tried to buy some bikes and sell them and make some profit ... bought 4 bikes, sold 3 of them with profit, the other one I will sell locally again here for the same price I bought or slightly above ;-) .... I sold 3 bikes for 766 euro ... but I bought them originally for only 270 euro ... so I made about 496 euro in gainings ... which is quite good and pretty good margin =))))))))) .... some people just don't know what their classical roadbikes are really worth ;-), but I was a bit lucky too that I got so good prizes ...

but ... and now the big but ...
ebay is charging me 70 euro in fees ... and one sell on paypal charged me 19 euro .... so 89 euro in Fees ... this is like 12 % of my total revenue (double it for my actual gains) of my sells ...
eBay just made 90 euro without doing anything ...
really what is going on right now on the auction market is unbelieveable ... ebay is totally exploiting their monopoly ...
they are doing so much money without having to do any effort just because they are in the right position ...
and it is crazy, there are so many free auction sites out there that can provide the same functionality ... and noone uses them, because of the lack of users ... everyone prefers to spend 15 % of their total revenue (not of their gains!!!) on this shit ebay ...
and it also leads to a lack of offers ... with these high fees you cannot sell something with small margins of 10-15 % ...
you need margins of at least 30 % to make the eBay experience worthwhile as a seller ... almost impossible ...

you could even make a comparison to quake ... quake 3 was an inferior game in movement (no bunnyhopping, no aircontrol, no doublejump), maps (complexity and design of most played maps Q3Tourney4, Q3Tourney2 speak for themselves) and also weapons (railgun is totally easy to hit with, mg is a n00b-weapon) than q1 or q2, but users switched from these old games because of the greater community, now you even have QL which is a very reduced version of the ripened Q3A that everyone has at hands and it is still preferred over it because of the community/marketing ...

the money eBay makes from overcharging its users stands in no relation to the costs of the service they do provide ... I have no problems with paying, it's also good to prevent unserious sellers ... I'd say 1-2 %, with a maximum of 5-10 Euro would be o.k. ...
but now I sold 3 articles, and they charge me 90 Euro, can you believe it?????????????????? I say I pay maximum 5 euro per article, and they would still generated billions of money ... but 90 euro only for providing a platform for me to sell 3 articles???
this reality right now with eBay makes me somewhat sad ... the users have the power to change something and get away from this exploitation business from eBay, and change to another site, but noone does anything!!!

Sites like eBay, Facebook imho. don't provide any innovation or make the world a better place, it's just companies that like parasites attached themselves to things that should be free!!!
Tbh. there should be some organization as the WWW or Wikipedia that provides a social network and there should also be an organization like this for buying and selling items from private users like eBay ... with no intents to make serious money, living just from donations or from very little fees that just sustain the costs for running the site ... it's still the users that create all the content, ebay, facebook are just dataservice-providers!!!

Another note, you know why I think facebook or eBay got popular?
I am making a comparison with chess ... in the past there have been youth talents in chess like Radjabov or Polgar ... but noone cared for them ... now you have a european ethnic carlsen and also a japanese american nakamura on the top ... and newspapers are just more interested in it ... just because they are from the right countries ...
To draw an analogy ... I go so far and say that you can't make a community business like facebook or ebay if you are from the wrong country ... especially for internetbusinesses you need to be from the us ... neither facebook or ebay are innovative groundbreaking sites or have been when they were created, they just happen to be from the right country, because everything that is coming from america is hip and cool ... but I think times get better now and people get more critical now for america, maybe market is getting more fair ...

To close this journal:

Social and Trade Business (like eBay, Facebook, Paypal) on the Internet should be provided only by NON-PROFIT organizations,
because a userbase creates a monopoly for one organization that cannot be shifted anymore ... at one point noone can compete anymore .... even if you have a much better product you cannot win anymore because of the lacking userbase that does not generate enough content ... in facebook or ebay the users generate the content, not the companies themselves ... they just provide a dataservice, that's all ... they don't have a right to charge for this community content!!! Maybe even sites like google should be obliged to release information they gathered from their users, their clicks for the keywords, etc. to other companies, because the users gave them these informations ... it's not really their search-technique making a connection between a link and the number of clicks ... so another company with better search algorithms has the same chance ... because now with everyone using google they have so much information from the users, that other search-engines won't be able to compete even if they have better search-algorithms!!!
User-Created Content/Information is something you should not be able to charge for!!!