Dr. KenB
The true cost of buying on eBay
We are all doing a LOT more shopping online these days as compared to just 3 years ago. With the price of gasoline, it is cheaper & easier to stay at home & have your goods brought to your door. And online vendors can offer the same goods for less because they do not have the added expense of rent, insurance & taxes on a bricks-&-mortar storefront plus the expense of transporting goods to individual stores plus employee expenses. From warehouse to you direct, what a deal! So of course shopping online is wonderful, but there are some caveats. Just as not all stores offer the same price, neither does online stores.
When many folks think of online vendors, they tend to think of Amazon as having the lowest prices. But there is a hugh caveat with Amazon: Amazon had what they call "dynamic pricing". Amazon monitors the prices of millions of items from thousands of vendors in real time (or close to it) and adjusts their prices accordingly. What does this mean for you? Well, I recently purchased an item on Amazon for $27.98. Before I even received the item, its online price dropped to $24,99. Will Amazon give you back the price difference? Yes & no. No, they will not give you the price difference back. Yes, you can return the item and repurchase it for the lower price, but you may or may not have to pay return shipping. And it is a pain to repackage the item, cut the label, and then take the package to one of their drop-off locations. Defeats the advantage of not having to drive your car to shop.
And Amazon is now on this kick about their packaging using less natural resources. What that means is that their boxes are thinner and less protective of the goods inside, and the use of no packing materials such as packing peanuts, crumpled brown paper, air bags, etc., means your individual items are loose and bounding around like crazy on their trip to your home. Like the old adage says, "You get what you pay for." Rather than be surprised that an item(s) arrive damaged, be surprised when they arrive undamaged!
Another thing to consider is eBay. eBay has a reputation of being the place to go for low prices. This may have been true 10 years ago, but not so much today. First, the quality of items on eBay tends to be lower than what you will get from another site, such as Amazon. Second, eBay's policies are NOT enforced with any regularity. For example, a bad vendor may be booted off eBay, but there is absolutely nothing in place to prevent that bad vendor from creating a new account on eBay and continue to sell. I experienced this personally with a seller who, in the course of less than 12 months, had 5 different eBay seller IDs due to his being booted from the system. eBay collects enough information from each vendor that they can easily tell when a vendor is re-appearing under a new seller ID. But they don't.
Another policy of eBay that I personally think is unethical is their fees. eBay currently charges a fee of 13% of the price of the item + 13% of your state's sales tax + 13% of the cost of S&H. [August 2026 Update: eBay is now charging 13.5%.] What does that mean to the customer? Let's look at an example:
If I am selling an item that I need to get $100 for in order to cover my costs & make a reasonable profit, and it costs $20 S&H, the total I need to charge the customer is $120.00. Let's assume for this example that the customer's state sales tax is 6%. Add another $7.20 for state sales tax and the total is $127.20. Now, eBay charges $13% of that total which is $16.54. Add that to your $127.20 and you get $143.74. But now eBay is taking 13% of $143.74, not $127.20, so you need to add another $2.15 to cover those additional eBay fees. But then eBay is taking 13% of $145.89, so you need to add another $0.28 to the total, bringing you to $146.17. [Welcome, kids, the your first class on compounding interest !] So to recap, in order to clear the $127.20 you need, you have to add $18.97 for eBay's fees, which brings the total to the customer of $146.17. And who eats that cost? The customer of course.
Looking at it a bit differently, the $100.00 for the item goes up to $114.91. The S&H of $20.00 becomes $22.98 and your 6% sales tax goes from $7.20 up to $8.28. THAT'S what eBay is doing for you, the customer.
What about AliExpress? I have made several purchases there recently, and half of them were bad transactions in that the items were not as described. Fortunately for me, the transaction amounts were not much and AliExpress refunded me entirely for those items. Still, a failure rate of 50% is far too high for me so I will not be purchasing from AliExpress (or Alibaba) anytime soon.
I very recently found another site called TEMU ( temu.com ). They are like eBay & Alibaba/AliExpress in that they have a wonderful selection of inexpensive items. I have made 3 purchases from them in the past week, and since they ship out of Garden City, NY, they get the orders filled & shipped quickly. I expect the first order to be here early in the first week of January, the 2nd order by the end of that week, and the third order by the 2nd week of January. With Alibaba/AliExpress you can expect items to take 2 months, give or take, to be received.
Of course, all major chains such as Walmart, Target, Lowes, Home Depot, etc., have online stores. Some of those chain sites offer only what they carry themselves, others - Walmart comes instantly to mind - are run like Amazon where a diversity of sellers in addition to Walmart itself sell on the platform. Whenever dealing with an online site, you need to consider the vendor's return policies, refunds, and of course, you need to shop around to make sure you are indeed getting the best price available.
The bottom line is that online shopping is more convenient in some ways but when returns are necessary, your savings in time and money may evaporate quickly. And you do pay for the convenience, one way or another.
