eBay does something right, fights against taxes

Written on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 | Filed under: Business Sense

I have not been a fan of eBay for a long time, particularly, since they purchased Paypal and now they are forcing eBay transactions to use its own Paypal services.  To me, they have been extremely greedy because it cost us to just use their site to list an item and then once it sells, they also take a percentage of the final price.  That’s not right, is it?  If I rent a space at the swapmeet or tradeshow for $200 for the day and make $10,000 in sales, it should be my profit right?  Why should they take a percentage on final sale?  Not only that, they recently have been pushing to eliminate other payment services from traditional mail payment like money orders to Paypal service only.  Thats to say my rented space at a swapmeet or tradeshow booth has to use chips only good at the show and I have to trade it in at the end of the day minus a 2.2% transcation fee.  That is plain wrong.  My friend who operates a eBay store as his only business cannot survive from all the listing fees, final sales fees and now Paypal transcation fees.

However, they may have done one thing right recently; which is to fight against the government levying taxes on digital sales.  Purchasing items on the internet has been one of the best joys in the last 15 years because of how convenient it was and the ability to obtain better deals because the lack of the costs of maintaining a brick & mortar store.  However, thats going to change if more taxes are going to be added onto ecommerce.  Taxing digital downloads such as movies, television shows, software applications, music and video games will just hurt the consumers as well as the small businesses.  I seriously hope this doesn’t come true but the internet is changing so rapidly now; things are just not what they used to be.

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