Hi Tudor, in regards to fees ..... that's just the economics of a free market economy in play unfortunately. While the market will sustain those level of fees, they have absolutely no reason to reduce them. So we essentially have ourselves, at least those of us that use eBay, to blame for that.
In regards to how other sellers are competing, I think that sometimes some of us tend to forget that eBay has more than just dropshippers using the marketplace, so here are a few major factors that you have to be aware of ......
1. Wholesale Sellers, sellers who are buying in large wholesale volume to secure the greatest possible price and then selling on a very tight margin to create market dominance through price and create profit through high turnover.
2. Multiple sales, if you have enough stock or various items listed at prices where you will sell, then you can afford to make smaller margins across the board and still make a good total margin through multiple product turnover
3. Sales funnel, sellers that are selling selected products at cost or below in an effort to draw in traffic and then try to capture other sales while they have their attention or of course drawing in heavy traffic to market their off-eBay site to customers. So you see, not everything being sold on eBay is being sold for an upfront profit, it's just an illusion!
eBay is like a duck on the pond, it might look like nothing is going on under the water, but there is all sorts of varied marketing techniques going on behind the scenes, you just can't see them, all you can see are the results!