Its an idiotic point. There is absolutely no way one can sell at MRP unless he is himself the manufacturer or is modifying the MRP label on the product himself.
For instance, I sold a calculator, whose MRP is 120 for 199
The "over informed" buyer has raised a claim for the remaining balance to be refunded to him. Now, I will approach a claim like this with heavy cynicism and bias because the "buyer" wants the privilige of "buying" something sitting from the comfort of his home but is unwilling to pay for the 'service' he is getting. I ll get back to this 'service' point later.
Now, lets take a look at what it costs for me to acquire this product and list it on ebay and then sell it.
INR 75.00 product cost on wholesale
INR 5.00 per product to ship it to my warehouse.
INR 2.00 Insertion fee
INR 3.00 Special 30 Day duration fee
INR 10.00 Final Value Fee
INR 80.00 Shipping Fee on avg - most of my customers have been beyond the 2000 km range
INR 20.00 Shipping overhead - For printing labels and travel cost - Courier centre not close to my warehouse.
Total So far : INR 195
Effective profit INR 5
But wait, lets not forget the Paisapay fees I pay on this. For every product worth INR 199 I receive INR 188.74
So now my profit lies at Negative INR 6.26
Question arises why would I sell for a mere profit of 5 Rupees right? Surely I must be a lying coniving greedy imbecile who's making 100 bucks per product sold.
But the truth is, I am not. I am a new seller, the established sellers on ebay ship through powerselling shipping program which costs them something like 35 - 40 per item (for each calculators). But to qualify for that I need to sell around 30 products in the last 30 days that is according to my account manager from ebay with whom I have spoken
OR
Have a minimum of 100 transactions and INR 144,000 in sales over the past 12 months. According to the text on the powerseller page.
That is my and every seller's goal to break that untouchable brass ceiling, not only on ebay but on any ecommerce platform, once we're beyond that 'lakshman rekha' we can start to churn in some profits. Also I am selling another product where the profit margin is high and I get to negate the effect of the loss that I face when I sell these calculators.
Lets get back to that 'service' that I referred to earlier. If you as a buyer want to buy stuff online, be that a TV or a chocolate, you are essentially avoiding the trouble of going out of your doors and avoid that travel and time cost. But you're not actually avoiding it, you are in essense deligating that task to the seller and the shipper. They do the travelling for you, you have to understand that as seller we can only charge you for the overheads, no one else will provide that to us. It still takes time and money to get that item to you and you HAVE to pay that because is the service you are getting and no, you are not entitled to that service when you pay the MRP on online products.
The indivisual sellers on ebay are not Flipkart or Amazon where we can ship the product to you because of bulk sales, I myself have sold only 14000 worth of products in the last 6 months, averaging 4 - 5 sales per month, that is no where near the 'bulk volumes' with which Amazon or Flipkart have.
Hence, whenever I see idiotic claims like these I can't help but roll my eyes to the back of my head out of the sheer agony and apathy in responding to such claims. But hey! I must!
