For the most part, Paypal is secure and even in cases where there is some fraudulent activity, Paypal will (more often than not) act in your favour. BUT Paypal is owned by eBay and this is the part I have a problem with. For the record, I’m writing this as an online SELLER.

If you sell something on eBay, you get charged a listing fee and a final value fee (FVF is a percentage of commission eBay charges for how much the item sold for). All fine and good; the fees are ridiculous, but you know what you’re getting into up front if you’re going to try and sell something via eBay; they don’t really mask any fees, so if you have a problem with fees after the fact, you’re really only as dumb as they told you that you were in the first place. The forced paypal option (ha) however, means that you also have to pay the paypal service charge for accepting payments. For the seller, this means another commission charge. You may sell an item for $5.00 on eBay (who will take their cut), but once you receive the payment in your paypal, paypal ALSO takes a cut. Double whammy? Sure. But also consider that paypal takes a cut of the TOTAL amount of your payment. That means if you’re charging $4.00 for shipping that item, paypal takes a percentage cut out of $9.00, not just the $5.00 that you sold an item for on eBay. Essentially, they’re forcing you to pay EXTRA for shipping than what you are charging the buyer for. It’s bullshit.

For the record, unless you are selling items that you ABSOLUTELY KNOW will make you money, you’re a fool to list them unless you pay the monthly fee to maintain an eBay ‘store’. I keep an inventory of 1000+ items every month in my eBay store. EBay will charge you extra to list your items if you don’t have a store and many times simple random items will not sell. HOWEVER, I’ve learned that people will buy just about ANYTHING so long as it is available. The trick is to keep it available and I’ve gotten rid of so much money for garbage that I may have otherwise thrown in the trash for the simple fact that I kept it for sale. On the other hand, unless you’ve got a closet full of crap to keep you busy for the next few years, this isn’t really an option.

I’m always looking for other options to eBay. I used eCrater for a while, which is free, but just doesn’t have the exposure that eBay does. I continue to use iOffer as an open alternative (the option of being able to transfer your ebay listings directly into your iOffer store is a plus), but although the traffic there is fair, the site is often glitchy and there are probably more problems for sellers than anywhere else. Which brings me to craigslist…

I’ve been able to unload some things on craigslist that I couldn’t have otherwise. I sold a G1 Megs on craigslist simply because eBay won’t allow you to sell a toy replica of an actual gun. I have sold several sets of car/truck rims on craigslist for pickup simply because the shipping costs are a major put-off. However, I’ve never dealt with more bullshit from any other online commerce than craigslist. It’s basically an open sore; any listing you make is open season for any phisher, casual observer or scam artist to contact you via email; and even though your email ID is kept private, to respond to these people means you respond to them with your contact information. For me, at least, there’s been a lot more meaningless back and forth as well as fielding phishing attempts with craigslist than I’ve ever had anywhere else. I see the merits of it being free, but there’s just so much bullshit to deal with otherwise.

Don’t sound so surprised.