Unless you have been hiding under a rock, I am sure that by now you have heard that eBay is raising its fees. So what's a small merchant to do? Here are some suggestions.

Get your own hosting. You can have your own online store and only have to pay for your hosting fees. Delspin Hosting offers a reasonable hosting plan for small merchants. You can also have somewhere to host your pictures if you decide to stay with Ebay.

You can still use your Paypal account with your hosted store. It also a good idea to find another alternative to process your credit card transactions because some people just dont like paypal.

Also, there are lots of other online auctions sites on the Internet. Just type in online auctions in your search engine and start experimenting with some of the online auction sites that rank in the top ten sites.

Bottom line: Ebay's fees are increasing. There's nothing you can do about that.

So instead of whining and complaining about something you can not control, you need to decide whether or not you are going to jump ship or adjust to the changes.

My personal opinion is to stick with it, because Ebay still comes up number one in the search engines when you type in online auctions. Are you really going to let all of that traffic pass you by?

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Copyright 2005