Making a fuss about your Reserve price.

[Meatloaf]

When I first started to sell on TradeMe I got told off. I looked at the email and couldn't understand why they were upset. Then I finally thought I figured it out, when they said that the Reserve Price you've set is too low, that's because the auction success fee is based on the minimum price you will accept. If the minimum price you will accept is $20, your auction success fee is based on $20. So I sold a very similiar item at no reserve and paid an auction success fee of 57 cents. Whereas with a Reserve Price of $20, I paid more than $2 more.

This means I'm paying 10% of that $20. When all the other fees are added a fee for your picture, a fee for the reserve price being met. A fee for Pay now, where people pay by credit card, I've worked it out that's another 5% approximately. So they want you to set a high reserve, as they will collect 10% of your minimum sales price and then they collect about another 5% with other fees, that's about 15%. And that's why the administrator was complaining about a low reserve price.

Oh that's not it, they also said that I was confusing the customer, I really couldn't see how I was. But that was never the issue, the issue was about profit maximisation.