I wrote a book about selling on eBay. That is not a boast, it is a disclosure: I liked the platform enough to spend months documenting it, and I am not somebody who arrived, had one bad experience and left.
It was genuinely good when I started. Hard to learn, because there was a great deal to know, and the learning curve was the barrier that kept the quality up. That barrier is gone and so is most of what it protected.
What has eBay turned into?
A dropship catalog for cheap Chinese manufacturing, with an auction site attached to it.
Browse almost any category and you get page after page of the same low-grade goods out of the same Chinese factories, listed by sellers who have never touched the item and never will. It is Temu-grade product at wildly inflated prices, and Temu itself is horrible, so that is the floor we are describing.
The tell is the pricing. The identical item appears at four dollars, at nineteen and at sixty, from different sellers, above the same stock photograph lifted from the same supplier catalog. None of them holds inventory. They are all ordering from the same warehouse when you buy, and the spread between them is whatever each seller thinks they can extract.
Understand what that means as a buyer. You are not choosing between products. You are choosing between markups on one product, and the listing that looks most professional is frequently the one charging the most for it.
Mixed into that are outright scams, which are a smaller problem than the mediocrity but a more memorable one.
How did the flood happen?
Dropshipping removed the requirement to own anything, and that changed who could sell.
I never mastered dropshipping myself. I understood it well enough to watch what it did to the marketplace. Once a seller needs no stock, no capital, no storage and no knowledge of the product, the number of sellers becomes effectively unlimited. Everything that used to make a listing worth trusting stopped meaning anything.
The supply side made it trivial. Chinese wholesale platforms exist specifically to let somebody list goods they have never seen, at any price they choose, and have the factory ship directly to the buyer with no branding on the parcel. The seller is a middleman with a spreadsheet.
Nothing about that is illegal and I am not claiming it is. It is a legitimate business model that happens to destroy the thing eBay was for, because the platform’s value was always that a listing represented a real item somebody had and would send you.
And the quality is what you would expect from goods manufactured to a price with no seller accountable for them. Chinese factories make superb things when a buyer demands and pays for quality. Nobody in this supply chain is demanding anything. The dropshipper never sees the product, so the only pressure on the factory is cost.
That is the actual mechanism, and it matters more than any complaint about origin. Bad goods are not arriving because of where they were made. They are arriving because a business model was built in which nobody involved in selling them has ever handled one.
What is the shipping trick?
The most consistently dishonest thing on the platform, and it works because of how people scan a page.
A listing shows ten ninety-five. The shipping is forty-nine ninety-five. The real price is sixty dollars and the seller is betting you looked at the first number and not the second.
That is not an exaggerated example. It is the shape of the thing, repeated across categories, and it exists because search sorts and displays on item price instead of total cost. Moving money from the product to the shipping line makes a listing rank and read as cheaper than it is.
The defense is simple and you have to do it every time. Ignore the price. Look only at delivered total, and sort by that where the interface lets you.
It is worth noticing what this tells you about a seller before you have bought anything. Somebody structuring their listing to be misread has told you how the rest of the transaction is going to go.
Is eBay still good for buyers?
Yes, in one specific mode, and it is nearly useless in the other.
If you know exactly what you want and go straight to it, eBay remains excellent. I buy model kits, miniatures and the occasional DVD, and for a named item, a specific kit number, an out-of-print title, it is still the best place there is. Nothing else has that depth of secondhand and discontinued stock.
If you are browsing, it is now worthless. You will spend an hour scrolling past dropship listings that look appealing and are not, at prices that have no relationship to what the item is worth, and you will come away with nothing.
That distinction did not use to exist. Browsing eBay was the point of eBay, and it is the thing that has been lost.
The practical version: use it as a search engine, never as a shop window. Arrive with a part number.
What does selling on eBay pay?
Here are my numbers, because a percentage from somebody who has not sold anything is worth nothing.
In 2025 I sold about twelve thousand dollars of model kits. After everything, I kept about three thousand six hundred.
That is thirty percent. Seventy cents of every dollar went to fees, shipping, packing materials and the rest of it. And that is before valuing a single hour of my own time: the photography, the listing, the questions, the packing, the trips to ship.
Price the labor at anything at all and the margin goes from poor to negative.
Two things make that number worse than it looks. Model kits are relatively good merchandise for this: identifiable, collectible, wanted by people who search for them by name. And I know what I am doing, having written a book on it. If thirty percent is what an informed seller gets on good stock, the casual seller clearing a cupboard is doing considerably worse and mostly does not realize it.
Where does the money go?
In layers, and the layering is why sellers misjudge it.
The final value fee comes off the total, which includes what the buyer paid for shipping, so eBay takes a cut of your postage. Payment processing takes its share. Promoted listings, which are close to mandatory now if you want visibility, take a percentage on top.
Then the physical costs, which are yours alone. Postage, and it has risen sharply. Boxes, padding, tape. Any item that needs protecting costs more to protect than sellers estimate.
Then the losses. Returns, damage in transit, and disputes, which mostly resolve toward the buyer.
No single one of those is outrageous. Stacked, they are seventy percent, and the reason people are surprised is that they are charged at different times by different parties and never appear as one number.
Why is it so hard to sell there now?
Because you are competing against sellers with a different cost structure.
A dropshipper carries no stock, no capital and no downside on unsold inventory. They can list ten thousand items and lose nothing on the ones that never sell. You cannot compete on price with somebody who has no inventory risk, and search does not distinguish between you.
Promoted listings then extract the difference. When enough sellers pay for placement, organic visibility stops being viable and the fee becomes a cost of entry instead of an option.
And the trust that used to be the platform’s real asset has been diluted. Feedback meant something when accounts were scarce and hard-won. It means much less now.
Should you still use eBay?
As a buyer, yes, with a part number and an eye on the delivered total. There is still no better source for out-of-print and discontinued items, and that is a genuine reason to keep an account.
As a seller, only with clear eyes about the arithmetic. If you have specific, identifiable, collectible stock that people search for by name, it can work, and thirty percent of something is better than a cupboard full of nothing. If you are hoping to build a business on general merchandise, you are entering a market whose economics are set by sellers who own no inventory.
What I would not do is what a great many people do, which is treat the revenue number as the result. Twelve thousand dollars sounds like a business. Three thousand six hundred, before counting a single hour, is a hobby that pays for itself.
Work out your own version of that number before you scale anything. It is the only figure that matters and it is the one eBay never shows you.
The Guides That Get Your Book Written, Published, and Sold
Four short, practical guides on writing, publishing, and selling your book, plus the occasional note when there's something worth your time. No fluff, no daily inbox clutter. Drop your email and they're yours.
We use MailerLite to manage our list and send these emails. Your address is used only to send you what you signed up for. We will not sell it, share it, or use it for anything else, and you can unsubscribe anytime.