eBay criticism, or From where did I get my dolls?

 Where did I get my dolls from?

eBay, of course.


It's quite the marketplace for My Twinn dolls.  For many years, I did not think much about it.  I was happy to look through the unique inventory, pay for my items and the shipping, and gladly open the packages once they arrived.

Eventually though, I grew out of it.  It started with my growing sympathy for post office workers.  Another doll in my collection became just another doll, and I could no longer justify what I perceived as the large effort to coordinate the shipping of a doll from the seller doorstep to my own.

For a while I considered selling things on eBay, but when I learned of the selling fees, which are 10% of the total sale, I was shocked.  Exactly how does the company get away with taking 10% of the total sale price?  They must think highly of their platform, but yeah?

Then I did some digging and learned that eBay makes about $10 billion dollars per year, and that the cost to run their website is more on the order of $20-100 million per year.  Roughly, eBay profits $30 million dollars per day, so that means that they can cover the annual cost of running their website, in a matter of about 3 days (out of 365 days).  The other 362 days are profitable to them, at a tune of $30 million dollars per day (credit for my research: Microsoft Copilot).


At any rate, I cannot much justify buying on eBay anymore, without imagining a big portion of my money going to line the pockets of the selling platform, and not the seller, who is the person that I am actually grateful towards, for selling me the item.

I mean, it just doesn't make sense.  The sellers effectively source the items for eBay, the sellers warehouse the items, the sellers take the pictures and upload them to eBay, the sellers write the descriptions of the products for eBay.  Sellers go so far as to package the items for shipping, and deliver them to the carrier.  So, it seems like eBay would need to be grateful to the sellers, for the many services that they provide, and they express that thankfulness by CHARGING THE SELLERS?


If you have any comments about this, please leave them below.  





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