I took a look at the belt you sold and the shipping was shown to the buyer as $15 using eBay International Standard Delivery. When you purchased the actual shipping label did you purchase it through eBay and did you in fact use the eBay International Standard Delivery service or did you by chance change the shipping method? As a side note the eBay International Standard Delivery will be going away and is being replaced by the EIS program which looks pretty good. There should not have been any sales tax on a foreign sale but the VAT tax is literally the same thing. EBay should have collected the VAT from the buyer or the buyer should have paid it when it went through customs. If eBay collected it from the buyer you may have paid a FVF on the tax.
As a seller the key to realizing a decent ROI is to have a cost model that you utilize to reverse engineer your listing cost. As a starting point you take into account all of the eBay selling costs which include the FVF's, PL fees and the shipping costs. You have to take a guess on the sales tax since it is not the same across the board for all states, cities, counties......... Once you have the costs estimates plugged in you can adjust the listing price to the point where you achieve an acceptable return. This will give you net payout from the eBay transaction. After that or in conjunction with that you will need to factor in the other costs that are external to eBay like COGS, supplies, packing materials, POV and Federal and State income taxes. As an example on your belt. your item actually sold for $23.80 I had to guess at your promotion rate and the tax.
Had you listed the belt for $35.
