Selling Cars on EBay Motors

If you decide to sell cars on eBay, you'll be selling on a slightly
different, but still connected, site called eBay Motors (at
www.motors.ebay.com). If you search on the regular eBay home
page for a certain type of car, eBay automatically takes you to
this connected site.

eBay is the world's largest seller of motor vehicles and was
projected to sell $12.9 billion in automobiles in 2005. That
means a car or truck sells on eBay every 60 seconds. This works
out to over 500,000 cars sold every year. That's a lot of cars!

Fees for selling cars on eBay

The fees to sell a car on eBay are really quite reasonable. In fact,
I can't understand why eBay doesn't raise these fees instead of
raising fees on smaller, less expensive items. To sell on eBay
Motors, you pay an insertion fee of $40 for a passenger vehicle.
After a bid is placed or the reserve price is met, you pay a transaction
fee. These are all listed in Table 3.1 by type of vehicle. For
example, if you sell a $15,000 passenger vehicle on eBay, you
pay $40 for the insertion fee and $40 for the transaction fee, for
a total of $80. As a percentage using the $15,000 example, these fees cost you only 0.53 percent, which is a little more than half
of a percentage point!

Selling new cars on eBay

If you deal with cars on eBay, you will most likely be selling used
vehicles. However, you could enter the new-car market if you
own a dealership or have access to cars at a great price from a
local dealer. Also, if there's a new hot car that everyone wants
and no one can get, you may be able to purchase it at retail and
still make money on it. An example would be the Toyota
Highlander hybrid SUVs, which were selling like crazy in late
2005. The waiting list was very long at some dealerships, and the
people lucky (or forward-thinking) enough to be the first on
the list made money by selling those cars on eBay.

The eBay Motors home page is a great resource to find out
what's hot. In mid-summer 2005, the top best-selling auto types
listed, in order, were:

1. Ford Mustang
2. BMW 3 Series
3. Toyota Sienna
4. Chevy Corvette
5. Harley-Davidson
6. Jeep Cherokee
7. Chevy Silverado
8. Mini-Cooper
9. Honda CR Series
10. Dodge Ram