TRU now on eBay

[bluemitch]

TRU is now on ebay with the same markups. Funny they have no auctions. Looked at their feedback and they only have 2 meaing they are not powersellers yet. I wonder if TRU pays the same fees as other ebay users.

http://stores.ebay.com/ToysRUs/_i.html? ... =971018353

[FireWolf]

I don't get the point of ordering from them since you have to pay shipping. Back at the tru site, they have free shipping above $49.

[Everybody]

If your searching ebay and you see toys r us and no nothing about their price markups, what are you going to do? Buy from a large chain or some guy/gal you've never met before and probably never will. It's just to get suckers to buy.

[starwarsgeek]

I wonder if TRU pays the same fees as other ebay users.

I think they do have to pay the two fees (ebay and paypal) like all other people.

[vynsane]

It seems like a weird move, but I guess it makes sense for them to be able to compete with the rest of the ebayers. It might actually reduce the amount of scalping going on, if they continue after this holiday season.

I bet they DON'T have to pay the same fees we would - they must have some sort of corporate account with ebay. They have the means to pay a certain contractual amount ahead of time at a greatly reduced rate.

[legitimatealex]

If your searching ebay and you see toys r us and no nothing about their price markups, what are you going to do? Buy from a large chain or some guy/gal you've never met before and probably never will. It's just to get suckers to buy.

^^ This. Informed customers do not fall for these sorts of gags.

[sadowsk1]

I'm not sure how much work it takes to develop this, but it seems like kind of a waste of resources...

[locutis]

I work for a large mail order company. Back in 2000 the owner decided to experiment with eBay, and we listed a few items, which sold instantly. Subsequently we sold over $1Million/year on eBay alone, even though we had our own online store, mail order catalog, etc. It used to take seconds to list an item on eBay, and the fees used to be lower, and we used to process payment ourselves instead of PayPal. Now we find that eBay is too time consuming, the fees are too high, and the PayPal requirement puts a hamper on selling a lot of our items. We use eBay for a handful of items now, several times per month, and instead use our own online site (which has included an auction function since 2006). We slowly migrated all of our customers over to our own site, and away from eBay.

Back in the early days, though, we would tell people to also check out our website, because we sold things there that we didn't sell on eBay, and quite frequently the reaction would be "I did". However, they were referring to our eBay store.

There was (and there still are, I find) a large percentage of clients who are either afraid of the internet in general, so they ONLY visit eBay, or when they were introduced to the internet were shown eBay first, and they think that's the whole internet. Yes, I've educated numerous customers about the address bar in their web browser and how you can type anything in there, it doesn't have to say ebay.com . :o