eBay: The Missing Manual

How Much Is It Going to Cost You?

The only free things in life are true love and homegrown tomatoes. Everything else—and that includes selling stuff on eBay—costs.

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, though—options 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 on—your 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 ...