In my inbox today, I had a nice little letter from Bill Cobb, President of eBay NA. In it, they listed another pricing increase (they did one about this time last year).
Fee Type
Item Price
New Fee
Current Fee
Insertion Fee
Starting Price:
$1.00 – $9.99
$0.40
$0.35
Final Value Fee
Selling Price:
$25.01 – $1000.00
3.25%
3%
As you can see, the listing price increased by $0.05 for the lowest priced items. Percentage-wise, that’s huge: 5% for a $1 item. The kicker, however, is the final value fee increase of .25%. That $25 – $1000 range is their big money maker.. that’s the equivalent of increasing taxes on the middle class.
When I first started selling stuff on eBay back in 1999, I was surprised that such a horribly designed sight could have that much exposure. I was successful at selling off a lot of the older computer related equipment that I had collected over the years (due to my profession), but continually marveled at the problems with the site (poor support for non-IE browsers, frequent page-loading problems, etc) and their lack of impact on the site’s growth.
What really got under my skin was the fact that they “double-dipped” in the whole on-line auction business. And, for those unfamiliar with the selling side, I mean that they charge you once to list the item (this charge is based upon the starting price of the item) and then they charge you once the listing has sold (a percentage based upon the selling price of the item).
With that alone, they were raking in the money.
I specifically used Paypal from early on because it was not eBay’s Billpoint (or whatever it was called). What I mean is that it was another company.
Then eBay bought Paypal. eBay then invented the “triple dip”. They now not only charge you for the (1) listing of the item and (2) the sale of the item, but they now charge a percentage when you accept payment for the item. As a side note, eBay doesn’t really like other on-line method payment methods, either. For example, Google Checkout is not an approved payment method with ebay.
Anyhow, I am sure that you would think that it is totally insane, but they do it and people put up with it. Plainly, if you want to sell used items on the web, the place to do it is on eBay. That is where you get the most exposure.
eBay has a history of increasing their prices and really giving back absolutely nothing. I believe, in this case, that this is the 2nd year in a row that they have increased their pricing. The main result is that it prevents a lot of the small sellers from selling on eBay and it increases the fees paid by most of their selling community. What has also happened is that a lot of the small sellers have turned around and adjusted their listing pricing and shipping/handling pricing to compensate for the cut that eBay is taking.
You’ve seen it. You see an item listed for $4.99, which is an outright bargain, but when you look at the $15.95 shipping/handling costs, you think to your self “What a rip! That should only cost $4.95 to ship. They are definitely not reputable.”
Well, on the eBay forums, you find that there are a lot of complaints about this practice. In fact, they have a policy where, if they (ebay) feel that the shipping/handling is too high, they will cancel the listing and issue the seller a warning. Enough warnings, and the ban the seller entirely.
If you really look at the situation, it is entirely of eBay’s making. As they raise the prices.. as they nickel-n-dime the seller.. the more this situation will happen.
And it isn’t like the seller.. or anyone, for that matter.. is getting anything back for the increases in prices. Nothing.
The best thing for everyone would be some good competition. But, like the Ma Bell (AT&T) of the past, there just isn’t anyone else in the same ballpark. Like the cable companies, we’ll just be forced to continue to pay the pig. Man, and I haven’t even mentioned anything about the Paypal transaction fee increases…
Solaris 10 is an entirely different animal than any of the preceeding versions. So much comes pre-installed now making it a heck of a lot easier for an Admin go bounce from Linux to Solaris without having to consider what platform he/she is truly on.
One of the difficulties I recently encountered was changing the IP of an interface on Solaris 10. Now, this is usually not a difficult task, so I was surprised when a simple edit of /etc/hosts and /etc/nodename, and /etc/hostname.ipge0 didn’t have the normal impact upon rebooting.
After some digging around, it seems that Solaris 10 relies on /etc/inet/ipnodes rather than /etc/hosts. Yes, you should update both, but the important one for interface specifics is /etc/ipnodes.
I have been having odd problems with a Mach Speed Viper K8M8MSr2 motherboard under Linux. All of my other machines, at this point in time, happen to be the same brand, make, and virtually the same model: those are the “r1” or revision 1 boards.
The problem I am seeing under Linux is:
I cannot load Fedora Core x64 4, 5, or 6 directly on the machine.
When I did get something to load, it had to be on a hard drive smaller than 160GB.
Any update to the kernel results in an machine that cannot boot off of the new kernel.
Now, individually, each one of those problems could be related to a distinctly different thing. However, all together, they just seem weird. Additionally, due to a bug in the BIOS version (A02) that is already on the board, I cannot boot the system off of the net (via a PXE boot) while all of my other machines, even client machines, boot off of the network without any issues. It was recommended by the support folks over at MachSpeed.com that I upgrade the BIOS to the A03 version.
So, I took on the task of upgrading the BIOS to the recommended level (A03). This is not easy, since all of the machine I build now-a-days do not have floppy drives in them. Fortunately, being the tech packrat that I am, I have about 15 floppy drives hanging around. But, first, I thought there had to be a better way, like a bootable CDROM.
After a lot of searching and trial-and-error, I came across Bart’s PE Builder which builds a custom bootable CDROM drive for just about any purpose. This worked out very well to create a bootable CDROM, but, unfortunately, it would not allow me to execute the awdflash.exe binary. It kept claiming that it wasn’t a Win32 executable. 🙁
After several attempts at other programs and the final failure with the PE Builder, I broke down and started with the floppy procedure. Now, I would have proceeded faster had I realized that Windows XP includes the option to make an MS-DOS bootable floppy. Since I didn’t know or notice that, I hunted all over until I found BIOSMods.com which provided some good floppy images. Of course, I found that site while looking in to an awdflash.exe problem (read further) after realizing that Windows XP could make the disks, but I thought it was worth noting the since since it has some good links to Dr-DOS.
So, I attached a floppy drive to my desktop system, right-mouse clicked on the A drive and selected “Format..”. Notice the option to “Create an MS-DOS startup disk”. I wish I had seen it earlier. 🙂
After clicking start, the drive whirred for a little while (Floppies are so inefficiently slow) and finished up. I opened up the disk to take a look at contents:
Things looked good. I copied over the awdflash.exe file I got from the Mach Speed BIOS update procedure and the correct BIOS file. There was literally no room left on the disk which worried me a little, but I thought I would cross (burn?) that bridge when I got there. Thinking I would be smart, I created a BIOS folder and placed the two files in to that folder.
I then hooked a floppy drive up to the Linux machine and booted off the floppy I just created (yes, I tested the boot functionality of the floppy on my machine first) and got to an A:\ prompt. I went in to the BIOS folder (cd BIOS) and executed the awflash.exe application (awdflash.exe K8MR2A03.BIN). awdflash.exe eventually came up and it had the BIOS file name pre-filled in. It was flashing “Please Wait” at the bottom of the screen as it was, I assumed, reading the BIOS off of the floppy. It stayed there forever, with the floppy drive spinning. 🙁
I then tried this same procedure on a test machine I had, and the results were exactly the same. I’m beginning to suspect a problem with the A03 BIOS file. By this time, it was late, and I gave up for the evening.
