[ahmadassaf]

1) For those who never put an ad on eBay before, when you finalizing your listing, you have this "FREE" word floating around the submit button, making you think that listing on eBay is free and how do they get money you say? well thats when you want to purchase addons or bump your add (or so the naive person inside me thought). The laptop was sold within hours of the listing, and the usual payment went through Paypal on hold until the shipment is sent. This is when you first realise that Paypal (which is owned by eBay) takes some fees to process your payment .. i was ok with that .. it was less than 60 USD on the transaction

2) Few days ago, I received a bill from eBay telling me that I have to pay close to 200 USD as ad fees, as it turns out that eBay takes a percentage on every transaction that happens.. I swallowed that too and made the payment .. in the end its on me not reading properly (but the devil in me completely blames eBay for not being transparent on this .. a simple fee calculator before you submit the ad is really minimal work)

[jjoonathan]

Yep, everyone wants a cut. 30% is a decent rule of thumb.

    eBay: 10%
    PayPal: 4%
    Shipping 5%      <-- maybe reflected in listing price
    Sales Tax: 7%    <-- not reflected in listing price
    Income Tax: YMMV
    Risk: YMMV

[nine_k]

I'd say if you see a large "FREE" button / banner / another clicky thing, the first reaction should be extreme caution and distrust. If they are trying to aggressively advertise it to you, they definitely see a way to profit off that, and the source of the profit is you.

The only exception should be things like "free and open source", but these things usually don't obnoxiously jump into your eyeballs.

[masonic]

PayPal is not owned by eBay anymore. In fact, you can easily buy with your credit card directly now and avoid PayPal's hidden default payment source (your bank account first).

[JakeWesorick]

Both these things are listed pretty clearly up front.

[jjoonathan]

Not remotely. eBay goes to great lengths to emphasize tiny listing fees and hide their enormous final value / transaction fees.

Source: I've since sold tens of thousands of dollars of goods on ebay, but I still remember my first time.