How Can I Reduce My eBay Or Amazon Fees?

The simple answer is don’t sell on eBay or Amazon! Rather self defeating really but I am serious, there are ways of eliminating eBay and Amazon fees quite legitimately when selling you products. Sell outside of eBay and Amazon and avoid the huge fees associated with putting your products before your prospective customers and yet another set of fees when you actually sell something.

Consider when you list a product on eBay, you pay a fee to list the item on the site; this is on a sliding scale depending on your starting price for an auction or the price of a fixed price listing. When your product sells you pay a final value fee depending on your closing price and a PayPal fee to process your payment. If your item does not sell you can list it again for another fee, (if it sells the second time around you will get a credit to you account for the listing fee).

For Amazon it costs nothing to list an item but Amazon take up to 171/2 % of the selling price which you set when you list the product for sale. The actual amount will vary from product to product. Check out the scale of charges by logging into your Amazon account.

By investing a little time and effort we can eliminate most of these charges and re-occurring fees. The answer is to have your own e-commerce website(s) now if this scares you half to death as it once did me I completely understand! I thought of doing this a few years ago but with no technical knowledge I knew I could not do it myself. I approached several web developers who quotes me fees form $1000 to $3000 this was far more than I could afford so I just thought I would stick to eBay and Amazon.

About a year ago I set my mind to it once again and having done some research found that many hosting companies offer template driven e-commerce solutions that are not only affordable but which look excellent and are easy to edit. You can buy your own domain name, find an e-commerce package to suit you (always start with the basic package). Using the control panel it is very easy to add your complete inventory in just a few hours. This is a very cost effective solution and the first one I setup costs me only $15 a month, so you can shop around for the package and deal that suits you best.

PayPal, World Pay and often many other payment options are included with the site so it’s only a matter of entering the relevant details when you setup the website. The next step is to drive traffic to your website, just hoping someone will find it will never work.

There are several ways of doing this, lets start with eBay itself, use the “About Me” section to include a link to your website, this is the only place you are allowed to do this. Setup an auto responder such as aweber and link it to your PayPal account so that customers get an “order received” e-mail when they buy through eBay. In that include a link as part of you signature NOT as part of the message body.

On dispatch include a compliments slip which gives you web address and some further information. Get some sticky return labels printed with your name address and website details on it. This will pay for itself after only two products have been returned undelivered.

On your website you can offer lower prices than eBay, there are no listing or final value fees to pay. Set the site up so that customers need to register their e-mail address before they make a purchase, you can then mail them out your latest offers every 2-3 weeks.

There is another method of selling of eBay which is the single page or single product websites but that will be the subject of another article.

Rob