Why eBay will never die

By lorelei

If one thing is immortal then it’s most definitely eBay. It lives off the percentage generated off other’s sales and deals. People will never stop selling, and most definitely won’t stop buying, and now let’s see what’s ebay’s profit off it. Let’s assume you decided to sell something as an auction item. Creating auction listing that starts below 1$ would cost you 20 cents. If you did not sell anything you pay no fees, and if you did, it’s 5.25% of the closing value for the first 25$, and then 5.25% of the initial $25.00 ($1.31), plus 3.25% of the initial $25.01 - $1,000.00 ($31.69), plus 1.50% of the remaining closing value balance ($1000.01 - closing value). Are you still with me?

It means, if 1 million listings are made weekly, and I believe there are more, and let’s assume NONE of the million items got sold (which is piratically impossible), eBay earnt 200,000$, just thanks to the listings. 200,000$ is not bad at all, but we are forgetting that there is more than one million weekly listings and sure as hell they sell. Even if half of these listings resulted in a lead and sale, i.e. 500,000 listings multiplied by $1.31 (again, very unlikely as they mostly are higher priced items), this means 200,000 listing fee + 655,00$ off the sales = 855,000$. Close to million dollar weekly revenue at the very very worst case. Oh well, that is what a 4 letter domain with number 2 traffic online can do!