Talk:Ebay Sales Policy

Some notes
As of April 2006, we are putting this policy into practice, more or less. There is currently one eBay seller taking a 25% cut (Timothy). Here's a check in after a month of operation:


 * Seller gets 25% of net sales profit (after all fees, stamps, blood, sweat, tears)
 * We're currently using 25% of the sale price. The buyer pays an estimated shipping cost. PayPal and eBay both take a fee, and UPS charges are a bit more than the estimated shipping fees calculated on eBay. We should watch how many hours are going in to the eBay work and see if 25% is enough for a worker to achieve a staff level salary, or if it should be increased (or decreased theoretically).


 * $200.00 cap per sale item ($800 sale and $2000 sale would pay off the same for seller)
 * This is because we don't want two sellers competing for the high end items. With only one seller currently, this is not an issue. We're waiving it for the time being. So far, only one pending item has been affected. (It is not included in the numbers below, because the sale is still pending.)


 * Monthly cap for profit on sale items of staff salary at 32 hours.
 * Staff are now working 35 hours on average, and this may go up again in the future. We might want to use a phrase that reflects whatever the current collective member maximum hours are or something like that.

After a month the breakdown looks like this with 23 items sold by the one seller:

$1,522.90 into PayPal (from eBay) for Timothy's items 272.27 goes towards shipping costs (estimate) 322.55 goes to Timothy (25% of sale price) 51.98 goes to PayPal as their percentage 29.89 goes to eBay as their monthly fee 54.87 UPS pickup charges (estimate) ===============================================   731.47 costs of selling the stuff (48%) 791.43 left over for Free Geek (52%)

The seller's cut for this month is about 1/4 - 1/5 of what collective members make (at 35 hours per week).