Ebay purchases should also have sales tax, it's just that the onus is on you to report it on your taxes rather than being taken automatically. I don't think it's very fair to add that as a negative to Amazon purchases. Other than that, I agree, many things have 10%-15% markup.
Most eBay sellers also provide free shipping, regardless of your order size, and it’s often faster than Amazon’s free shipping. If you’re looking for something relatively common, you can filter eBay results by distance to your home, and sometimes you can get your item next day for free shipping. eBay is surprisingly good as a buyer.
Understood, however, that as a seller eBay is a pretty tough partner.
>Most eBay sellers also provide free shipping, regardless of your order size
Quite a while ago eBay switched to charging final value fees on shipping. Previous to that people would list items for $.01 plus $8 shipping, which was pretty obnoxious to weed through. With that change it ended up making sense for eBay sellers to just bundle the cost of shipping into the price, which ends up usually being a better experience for the customer, because they know what they are going to pay right away.
