any ebay sellers out there?

less, of course. It's been awhile since I checked prices and etc, that's why I started this thread - to get suggestions on where to sell my goodies.

Daniel,
I'm sure you don't mean to but you are coming across as very condescending to Phil. And you obviously have not been a regular seller on eBay for a while. Ebay fees (including Pay Pal) can total up to between 14-20%, especially on lower priced items. And that doesn't include the hit the seller takes on eBay's final value fees which are now charged on shipping too.

But the fees are only part of the problems seller's are having with eBay. For example: I have two Pay Pal accounts attached to two different checking accounts which I use alternately, based on convenience, to pay my eBay fees each month. Once without my permission and without notifying me, eBay took it upon themselves to change my seller account preferences to "automatic payment" and drew their Invoice amount off of a different account than I had planned to use to pay my eBay fees with that month. This caused an inconvenient scurry to have to make another deposit to prevent a check I had written from bouncing.

Another example: Recently I sold a piece of equipment with accessories on eBay and shipped them to a customer. The accessories were packed in smaller boxes and placed w/styro peanuts in the bottom of the main box with the piece of equipment. When the customer received the package they pulled the main piece of equipment out of the box and didn't search further. Instead assuming that I had shorted them the accessories, and without asking me, they filed a complaint with eBay which prompted eBay to immediately, without contacting me first, freeze my Pay Pal account. If I had already transferred those funds to my checking account then eBay would have issued a draw against my checking account which could have caused any checks I had written to bounce. After receiving the e-mail from eBay about the filed complaint notice, I e-mailed the customer and told her to go through the rest of the box which she did and of coarse she found the items she thought she had been shorted and closed the case she filed. It took me half the afternoon to get that straightened out and to get my Pay Pal account unlocked so I could use it for plans I had for the following day.

And though I have not had it happen to me (yet), I've heard several stories from eBay sellers (including from a friend of mine that I have always known to be an honest man) who were cheated by a dishonest buyer filling a false claim. And eBay used their ownership of Pay Pal to unjustly extract money from the seller. In my friend's case, eBay extracted the cost of the item from his account, plus shipping costs. And my friend never got his horse tact back from the buyer either. So he was out the cost of the item, the cost of shipping, and the item itself.

As in these cases, eBay has gained a reputation for using their ownership of Pay Pal abusively against their sellers. I could continue on with many other eBay grievances from over the years but wouldn't want to be perceived as complaining too much.

Buyers can burned as well.  I have had several instances on Ebay where the seller never sent the goods and Ebay would do nothing about it.  For example, I won a flash drive in one auction and the seller never sent the item.  So I filed a complaint and Ebay wrote me back that I was not going to get my money back because the seller closed his bank account.  So much for Ebay's supposed buyer protection!

RE: Ebay competition. Square just announced the are going to have an "online marketplace".

squareup.com/

Link to the marketplace page.
squareup.com/register/sell-online

I am a HUGE square fan. Let's hope the marketplace gets traction and competes favorably (for consumers) with ebby.

It was paid through Paypal.

Should Ebay have paid? Not necessarily. My gripe with them is that they give the illusion of a buyer protection. Why didn't Ebay pursue legal action against the buyer to recover my money. They, not I, had all the seller's information to pursue him. And what is Ebay's buyer protection if they are just going to tell you that you are s*** out of luck when you get screwed over by the seller? If they are not going to protect the consumer then in my opinion Ebay should stop fraudulently claiming that they have a buyer protection program. It gives the buyer a false sense of security that Ebay will actually lift a finger to try and go after the seller when things like this happen.

Ebay "buyer protection" only applies to instances where the seller is not engaging in outright fraud.
It's all there in the fine print. As a buyer you need to pay attention to how long they've been a seller and their
feedback. I used to take a risk with new sellers, but no more, especially overseas sellers the old adage applies'
You get what you pay for.
Daniel, is it really fair to compare ebay with consignment? The services recieved from a consignment shop are
not at all comparable to ebay, we do all the work, they simply host the transaction.

Lee

Daniel wrote: "I do not know how you get up to 20%. Maybe that includes some additional picture/listing services. I was using 13% or 14%, so 20% is not much higher - just for the point of conversation."
and "...after 9% fee and 3% more for PayPal".
Read more: forum.rocktumblinghobby.com/thread/60586/any-ebay-sellers-out?page=2#ixzz2XoscMFK7
Read more: forum.rocktumblinghobby.com/thread/60586/any-ebay-sellers-out?page=2#ixzz2XocGCLh6

Daniel,
I don't know where you are getting your information from but eBay's final value fee on Standard Category items is 10%, not 9%. In addition to the final value fees there are other fees which may be tacked on, like insertion fees, auction style listing fees, auction reserve price fees, and other optional listing upgrade fees. Then on top of those fees are the (eBay owned) Pay Pal fees.
Currently for standard non-store accounts eBay doesn't charge insertion fees on the first 50 items per month for Standard Category listings. After the first 50 items eBay charges an insertion fee of thirty cents per item, whether the item sells or not. That may not seem like much but for someone who is trying to supplement their income and is listing a modest 150-200 items per month, that's another $30-$45 in fees per month which does subtract from their bottom line. Especially when considering that in a good month they will likely only have a 40-50% selling rate of those listings. So the insertion fees on the items that didn't sell get absorbed out of any profits from the items that did sell. And as I have mentioned before, eBay charges a 10% final value fee on shipping as well. So the seller has to either absorb those fees or tack them on to the customer's shipping costs and risk alienating the customers by making them feel that they are being gouged on shipping.
I have found that I have a higher selling rate using Auction Style listings so that is the format I prefer. Currently eBay is allowing standard account holders to list 50 auction style listings per month before charging an auction style listing fee. But if a seller wishes to have a reserve price on their auction listing then there is a Reserve Price fee added on which ranges from $2 up to $50 per item. In some cases such as with more expensive items it does seem to generate more interest from bidders to have a lower starting bid and have a Reserve Price rather than trying to start the item at the minimum price needed and to not use the Reserve Price option.
There are also several other listing upgrades available that I never use with the exception of occasionally the "listing an item in two categories" option. And of course their is a fee for that too.
As for the eBay owned Pay Pal fees; the set percentage rate is 2.9%. But you are overlooking the fact that there is also an addition transaction fee of thirty cents on every trans action. On a $10 dollar transaction the total Pay Pal fee would be fifty-nine cents or 5.9%, $30 transaction the total Pay Pal fee would be $1.17 or 3.9%, a $50 transaction the Pay Pal fee would be $1.75 or 3.5%, etc.. Listing an assortment of Lapidary related items, I have found that each month my Pay Pal fees average near 4% . This combined with my eBay Final Value fees, Listing fees, and auction fees, totals averages between 14%-20% with each round of listings. Which is 2X what they averaged in 1997-98.
Since you are showing so much interest in the topic, I would encourage you to give selling on eBay a try. Nothing teaches like experience. Spend your money, and the necessary time required to; locate unique quality materials, fashion them into marketable items, take photographs, edit/crop the photos as needed, compose item descriptions, post the listings, send out invoices, procure packaging materials, pack the sold items, deliver them to the shipper, post the shipping notices, deal with late payers and make subsequent trips to the shipper due to the late payers. Then give eBay the Lion's Share of any profit you may have made and see if you still believe as you posted earlier that "20% is not that much higher than 14%", and see if you still "...think that folks complain too much about eBay fees." I'll bet you'll feel differently.
Also you asked if I have ever sold on Amazon? Back in the late 1990s I helped a friend set up a zShop selling used books on Amazon at fixed prices. I do not remember what Amazon's fees were then but I'm thinking they were 9%. At that time Ebay's fees were low and there were no Pay Pal fees, so at 15% Amazon would not have been being competitive.
But again as I stated in my first post to this thread, my opinion is; "...unfortunately for now, they [eBay] are the only real game in town" (for selling Lapidary related items on the internet).

Thanks Scott! Let's hope Square Market Place develops into something sustainable for small sellers. They may be a good place for selling finished jewelry in the beginning but will probably take a while to get the traffic necessary to make it worth while for trying to sell unfinished lapidary materials. But it should be worth watching for!