Online shopping: Auction house under pressure: Ebay almost completely eliminates fees for private sellers

February 28, 2023

Private customers are apparently running away from Ebay: In future, the platform will no longer charge any listing fees or sales commissions for sales from private customers. Few remaining fees remain for exceptional cases.

Private sales on Ebay have become less and less important in recent years. Mainly because of the competition from the classifieds platform of the same name, many customers avoided the auction platform, which sometimes raked in horrendous fees for a successful sale. However, since Ebay classifieds has not been part of the Ebay universe for a while (and will soon be renamed), the former parent company apparently has to reorient itself.

Private eBay sellers exempt from fees

From now on there are no more fees for private sellers on Ebay – both the offer and the sales fee (or commission) are omitted without replacement.

Oliver Klinck, Managing Director of Ebay Germany, told the DPA news agency that the waiver of the fees should help to expand the variety of offers on Ebay and thus strengthen the platform as a whole. Because, according to Klinck: “We see that private sellers are also much more active as buyers. Those who sell on eBay also shop twice as much as buyers who only buy.”

The exemption from fees expressly only applies to private sellers who behave accordingly. “If someone regularly sells 20 iPhones a day, then that is a very clear indication for us that this is not a private seller,” Klinck told the DPA.

Ebay employees and special algorithms should comb the offer for such black sheep in the future and take appropriate steps if the free advertisements are misused. So far, sellers have had to give around eleven percent of the proceeds and up to 35 cents as a listing fee to Ebay.

Buy it now and price suggestions also free of charge

The new rules and all additional options for offers can be found in the fine print on Ebay. According to this, up to 320 advertisements per month are free of charge without any ifs and buts, after the quota has been exhausted, 50 cents per offer are due. Exception: In the case of auctions lasting more than three days with a starting price of one euro, 2,500 additional advertisements are free of charge.

Some additional options will remain chargeable in the future, but these do not include the important Buy It Now option, the possibility for price suggestions and start scheduling.

Ebay also offers a free authenticity check for particularly expensive items whose authenticity plays an important role in the value. The offer applies to luxury watches, sneakers and expensive handbags, for example.