People like to bitch about Paypal and Ebay.
Lets start with Paypal, essentially a clearing house. They start out at 5.25%. The more your use them, the cheaper it gets. Pretty much the same as any other clearing house pricewise, but without the commitments, or the rental/initial outlay on PDQ machines. Also means you can get around having pay for, and jump through the hoops required for, PCI compliance. Its also incredibly easy to set up and use, unlike other clearing houses. This is quite a competitive market.
Ebay, the auction house for people's otherwise unsellable tat. It is just that, an auction house. You pay fees (sometimes, only if you sell) for them to auction it off on your behalf. The fees are stated beforehand, there are no surprises. The fees seemed to be much more reasonable than when I last went to sell stuff at a traditional auction (admitted a few years ago now).
Some people have a mindset that because its on the internet, it should be free. Providing internet services is not cheap - the capital involved to set it up and regularly replace the servers and infrastructure is colossal, and the ongoing bills for bandwidth, power and cooling are even more eye watering. A company like Ebay or Paypal would also require top tier support contracts from all their suppliers.
For example, I'm currently building the infrastructure for an upgraded "Customer Portal" for a 3rd party. It has 10 HP C7000 chassis', each full of a full compliment (16) Proliant blades, each with 2 16 cores Opteron CPUs, and 128Gb RAM. The chassis' have all the FC and 10Gbe interconnect modules to talk out. To make this work, there are also 2 XP SANs, each with a pair of switch fabrics, and 4 Netapps Filers. Linking this altogether are Cisco switches, routers and ACEs, and a whole bunch of firewalls from a well respected company that I'm sure I'm not allowed to say. All of this stuff needs 24/7/365 top tier support, which over the life of the components, will be more than the capital cost. The life of the individual components is likely to be a maximum of 5yrs, although it may be expanded long before then. I'll leave you to calculate costs. Then factor in bandwidth, electric and cooling.
And this is just to provide the portal. Customer data is held on existing backend kit.
So, in reality, I don't think Paypal and Ebay are so bad
