Blog Insights: Ebay and fee hikes: No longer for small-time entrepreneurs?

What bloggers are saying about the latest in information technology

One of the things I've always liked about the Internet is that it created a venue for small-time entrepreneurs who wouldn't otherwise be able to compete. For a few bucks a month, anyone can rent a little corner of cyberspace and set up shop. Companies like eBay came onto the scene early in the online retail picture, creating an infrastructure that allowed very small micro-businesses to flourish. But while it did create a lot of micro-businesses, eBay itself grew into a very large macro-business, and like larger businesses tend to do, they forgot about the little guy that made them so big in the first place.



One of the most common complaints about eBay is the ever-growing fee structure, which seems to nickel and dime everybody completely out of the market. In the early days of eBay, it was a great way to put something online, see if it would sell, and test the market. If it worked, you'd put on similar items. But higher and higher fees make this sort of experimentation impossible. If you don't sell what you put out there, the loss is becoming unacceptably large--often wiping out any profits made on the items that do sell.



And now, the fees went up again, in an effort to shift focus away from eBay stores and towards core auction listings. Curious? Definitely. Most eBay shoppers will tell you that they like the eBay store format most of all, and merchants appreciate the concept in that it allows them to create a more coherent presence. But is eBay listening to the folks who made them wealthy? Apparently not. Ebay merchant Mikes4X4andtruckrepair shut down his eBay store and lodged a unique protest of the fee hikes, posting what he called a "cost increase protest frog" in an auction listing. A surprising number of other merchants have also closed their eBay stores in protest of the fee hikes.

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