Ebay store question?

The Store Membership is how eBay collects a reliable monthly subscription fee from its Sellers, and in exchange offer them lower rates for things such as Fixed Price insertion which I believe is 25 cents for a Fixed Price listing for non-store owners, but only 5 cent for Premium ($50/mo) Store members.

If you spend $50.00/mo for their mid-level membership, you get greatly reduced rates but its actually overkill for most sellers because they don't list up enough items a month to make up for the $50 up front fee. For example, if you list 250 items a month to be able to qualify for the Premium Store membership, you spend 5 cents per listing which is $62.50 which includes membership. If you sell 250 items at .25, its the same price $62.50. However, most people are actually limited to selling 100 items a month. So you see, it isn't really a "discount" unless you sell More than 250 items a month.

Data collected amongst my students is that only 21% of them are allowed to sell more than 100 items a month because they feel that beyond that, it isn't worth it to them. This is indirectly because they don't have any real capital invested or aren't serious enough about an income goal of more than a couple hundred dollars a month in profit thus only want to or can only commit what they deem to be "part time hours." Some of them report that eBay simply won't allow them to become larger sellers who can sell in higher monthly volume.

Several of my stores are "Anchor Stores" which means I pay $300/mo and list and sell several thousand items per month, per account. The 3 cent insertion does very little for me, I save maybe a couple hundred dollars a month but Anchors are a gateway to getting an account representative on eBay. For example, 2 months ago one of my accounts went down because of a stream of false "Not a Verified Rights Owner" claims from a competitor for items I am allowed to sell/distribute. If I were Not an Anchor Store, I am 99.99% positive that I would have been screwed because I would have been left conversing with people from Singapore trying to get my account reinstated who, as eBay CSR's, don't actually have the authority or know-how to reinstate an account or investigate matters.

eBay Stores USED to be "cool" back in the early to mid 2000's because people ran essentially their own eCommerce stores when eBay's core sales were based on Auctions, so people went to a store and did a Buy it Now. Now eBays core sales are from Fixed Price listings from traffic that came from Search Engines and very little from eBay itself.

I hope this clarifies a couple things for you.

Better double check the final value fees on those type of items as they probably fall into the higher 9% fee range. Also the duplicate listing rule is a complete joke. Check any category and there are literally hundreds of duplicate listings from the same sellers. Just change 1 or 2 words in the title and it will never get picked up as a duplicate listing.