Much as I do understand some of the dislike for paying fees, I have to wonder how many people can really do better to sell their stuff locally or otherwise on their own. In the example of losing over 40% of total sales on fees (which sounds unusually high to me), could that same person have done better by trying to sell their stuff on craigslist, by posting on facebook, or otherwise finding buyers for it? In most cases, I tend to doubt it.
But let's actually look at the fees for a moment. On eBay, it's an insertion fee of 30 cents (only after 50 listings per month) and a 'final value fee' of 10% of the final value. For Paypal, it's 30 cents + 2.9% of the price. So, in total, we're looking at 12.9% + 60 cents. On an item that sells for $10, that's a total of 18.9%. Higher priced items that will actually end up being a lower percentage. Maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but I don't feel like that's a bad price to pay at all. To be fair, yes, there are optional services that can be tacked on which will raise the total fees, but if the fees are adding up to that much of the profit margin, it seems like there's a point where those optional services just aren't worth it. As a hyperolic example, I'm certainly not going to takeout an ad for a highway billboard so I can sell my old push lawnmower; for the same reason I'm not going to pay extra for a larger listing picture, bolding, highlights, or whatever other expensive option eBay wants to offer me.
I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around a situation where so much of one's total sales value is lost to fees... it tells me that there's a combination of a lot of optional features being used, combined with a lot of items selling for very low value, and probably a lot of items being listed over and over and over again (at a cost of 30 cents per iteration) without selling. If I am incorrect about any of that, I would certainly love to hear other ways one can spend that much in fees.
For "only" hosting my listing (on a site that has probably the widest reach to the most buyers of any similar site online), and for handling the payment transaction (which would cost me a similar fee, probably higher actually, to have my own merchant account), I feel like I'm getting a pretty good deal. Apparently not everyone feels the same, and that's fine, but they're welcome to find another place to "only host the listing".
