Originally Posted by jdandns
Well, in 1997, for instance, all payments were made by money orders, so there were no Paypal fees for sellers to pay. Listing fees were around 25 cents per item with free listings being rare, but final value fees were very low, much lower than now, and the bigger the ticket you sold, the lower the fees were for that transaction as it operated on a sliding scale.
I sold a comic book for $2,700 and as I recall, the fees on it went all the way down to 1.25% so that the final value seller fees on that were about 35 bucks, as opposed to the $270 it would be today.
Also, tracking was not required. Your word to Ebay you had sent it was good enough, if there was a dispute, which was seldom. Bidders virtually always paid sellers who virtually always delivered what was promised. Beyond that, shipping up to a pound by Priority Mail was $2.90 with tracking 30 cents, and international shipping wasn't much more.
As a buyer, there were a manageable number of auctions so that you could actually look at pretty much everything that interested you, and it was virtually all for bids only, so you had a real shot at winning auctions. Buy-it-now prices, once introduced, only had to be 10% higher than the minimum bid, so you could get some real steals (or, make some quick sales) that way, too.
Everything was always better before, but someday, people will point to this time, and long for it as well, so how bad could it be?
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