I never agreed to pay $74 (plus shipping!) to sell this item. Who would ever do that??
This reminds me of many years ago. Maybe about 8 or 9 years?
A friend & I decided to have a garage sale and we looked up advertising fees in the local paper. Not the state newspaper or anything. The local rag. For 2 lines, it was going to cost us about $65 +.
So we skipped it and scouted around for other places online to advertise for free and found a couple.
The point is, we would have had to pay that advertising fee whether we sold a thing or not. Your fee only comes into play if you make a sale. The reality of the situation is you'll always be paying these sorts of fees to most major advertisers, and ebay is a major platform. You're paying for the exposure.
There are an awful lot of people around who are not interested in local pick up, they like to be anonymous, as far as possible. There are others who will be interested in your items but live interstate. Ebay caters for that crowd, where usually they know instantly that they have a purchase and can just go ahead with everything online (you'll notice auctions aren't as common on ebay now as they once were, probably for the above reasons).
So yes, if you want to avoid fees at all, you need to look elsewhere. Even gumtree and marketplace have some fees if you decide you want more exposure for an item though.
