eBay[c] The Missing Manual

The only free things in life are true love and homegrown tomatoes. Everything elseand that includes selling stuff on eBaycosts.

Exactly how much eBay charges to let you sell on their site depends on the choices you make when you list your item (Section 5.4) and the final price your item goes for when the auction ends. Altogether, eBay charges three different categories of sellers' fees:

• Insertion fee . The insertion fee is the minimum you pay to list an item, and it ranges from a quarter to just under five dollars, based on the starting price you choose for your item, according to the fee schedule in Table 5-1.

  Table 5-1. eBay Insertion Fees

  Your Item's Starting Price	Insertion Fee
  From $0.01 to $0.99	$0.25
  From $1.00 to $9.99	$0.35
  From $10.00 to $24.99	$0.60
  From $25.00 to $49.99	$1.20
  From $50.00 to $199.99	$2.40
  From $200.00 to $499.99	$3.60
  $500.00 or above	$4.80

• Listing fees . These fees buy you a basic listing of seven days or less with one hosted picture. (For details on how to list an item, see Section 5.4.) As soon as you start adding listing options, thoughoptions such as Buy It Now, Picture Gallery, Listing Designer to add a border to your listing, highlighting to make your auction show up in a search results list, more photos, and so onyour fees increase. eBay shows you the total cost of inserting your auction before you submit the listing, so if it looks like fees are getting high in relation to the price of the item, you can revise your listing to cut back on some of the bells and whistles.

  Listing fees are nonrefundable, with two exceptions. If the item doesn't sell and you relist it within 90 days, you can get a listing-fee credit. (This is only good the first time you relist the item; if the second auction doesn't sell it, you pay the insertion fees.) The second exception: if someone wins your auction and doesn't pay, you can get a relisting credit after you've reported and resolved an Unpaid Item dispute (Section 5.7.2.1).

  Note: Some areas of eBay have different fee scales : eBay Stores (Section 7.3), eBay Motors (Section 8.2), and real estate listings (Section 8.3).

• Final Value Fee . Insertion and listing fees aren't all eBay charges. There's also a Final Value Fee (FVF), which is a percentage of your item's selling price. If the item doesn't sell, of course, there's no FVF. But if it does, eBay figures the FVF according to this schedule:

  If the selling price is from a penny to $25.00, the FVF is 5.25 percent of that price.

  From $25.01 to $1,000, you pay $1.31 (5.25 percent of the first $25) plus 2.75 percent of the amount that's over $25.

  If the selling price is $1,000.01 or higher, you pay $1.31 (5.25 percent of the first $25) plus $26.81 (2.75 percent of the next $975) plus 1.5 percent of the amount that's over $1,000.

All those percentages and plusses get confusing, so here are some examples:

• If you sell a folding camp chair for $12.94, that's below the first cutoff of $25, so your FVF is 68 cents. (5.25 percent of $12.94 is 68 cents .)

• If you sell a pair of Windsor chairs for $272, the price went over that first $25 cutoff. Your FVF is $1.31 (which is 5.25 percent of $25) plus 2.75 percent of the remaining amount: 272 - 25 = 247, and 2.75 percent of 247 is $6.79. Add the $1.31 and the $6.79 together to get your FVF of $8.10.

• If you sell a leather sofa for $1,204, you've passed the second cutoff of $1,000. Your auction went $204 over that second cutoff, so you add 1.5 percent of the extra amount, which is $3.06, to determine the FVF: $1.31 for the first $25, plus $26.81 for the next $975, plus $3.06 for the last $204 makes a grand total FVF of $31.18.

The graduated scale for FVFs seems complicated, but it saves you money when you sell big-ticket items. If eBay charged a flat 5.25 percent on all auctions, the FVF for that $1,204 sofa would be $63.21more than twice the FVF you pay with the graduated scale.

If all this calculating makes your head spin, don't worry. eBay figures out your Final Value Fees for you and adds them to the insertion fees to determine the total amount you owe. It's worth learning how the system works, though, so you can take into account what you'll pay eBay when figuring out what price you'll accept for your signed, first edition copy of Black Beauty .