When selling items online, many sellers fail to take into account all the little extra charges when determining their profit for a sale, the month, or the year.

With the convenience of PayPal and other online payment services, people can get paid remarkably quickly, as opposed to previous methods where you had to wait for a check or money order, then worry if the check would bounce.

But many fail to take into account the cost of those little extra conveniences when setting their prices and determining their profit.

Consider that you are selling your daughter's old Baby Gap overalls, and you would like to get $9.99 for them, so you set that as your opening bid. Right off the bat when you list them on eBay, your listing fee is $0.30. Did you use a Buy It Now price? That's another $.05. Did you add your item to eBay's gallery to showcase a photo of the item? There's another $.25. Suddenly, just from listing the auction, you are down to $9.39 as your profit. And you are charged those fees regardless of whether the item sells or not.

Now, let's say you got one bid of $9.99 on your item. Your final value auction fee that eBay charges you is $0.52. Now your profit is down to $8.87

If you use an online auction management tool to send auction emails and to keep track of payments and auctions such as Auctiva (eBud) you are charged for that too. If you list 50 auctions a month, that is another $0.34 per auction. Now your profit has dropped to $8.53

Your high bidder decides to go for convenience and pay for your auction using PayPal. Once you have accepted a certain dollar value in funds into your account, PayPal charges you a fee. On $9.99 sale, your payment fee is $0.59 (because shipping charges vary, we have only calculated the bid price when determining the payment fee for simplicity). Now your profit is suddenly $7.94 on a $9.99 sale.

Now, what if you weren't selling your daughter's overalls, but something you had purchased for $6.99 to resell on eBay. At first glance, a $9.99 selling price seems like a huge profit, but in reality, you only made ninety-five cents for all the work of photographing and listing the item, contacting the high bidder after the auction ends, processing the payment, then packaging the item and taking it to the post office to mail. All that work is not really worth a measly ninety-five cents.

What if you bought an item for $7.99 and sold it for $9.99? Now it actually cost you four cents to go to all the trouble and work to sell that item.

When you are selling online, it is extremely important to consider how much profit you will make when selling on eBay, so you can be certain that it is a money-making venture and not a money losing one.

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