Value Fees on Sales Tax

[dnasilver]

How is it possible to calculate your cost when you have no idea where an item will sell? Having a fixed fee on managing sales tax is doable, but not a percentage on top of an unknown sales tax percentage. There is no possible way to calculate your costs to determine selling price. 

[luckythewinner]

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@dnasilver wrote:

How is it possible to calculate your cost when you have no idea where an item will sell? Having a fixed fee on managing sales tax is doable, but not a percentage on top of an unknown sales tax percentage. There is no possible way to calculate your costs to determine selling price. 

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You simply assume sales tax will be 10%. So instead of assuming the eBay fee will be 30 cents plus 12.55% of the total, you assume it will be 30 cents plus 13.805% of the total. 

Then if you sell to me in New Hampshire, you make a little extra. 

[releasethekraken_1]

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@dnasilver wrote:

How is it possible to calculate your cost when you have no idea where an item will sell? Having a fixed fee on managing sales tax is doable, but not a percentage on top of an unknown sales tax percentage. There is no possible way to calculate your costs to determine selling price. 

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How did you do it when PayPal was charging you a percentage of the sales tax? Do it the same way now.

[dnasilver]

Paypal never did on us.

[dnasilver]

So, 10% add on a $1000 item covers me. Sorry but that is not true cost. Let alone it puts you out of range where there is zero sales tax.  A fee is fair, charging a percent is flat out wrong.   

[gjs_16]

Yeah I don't ever give it that much thought, I just use a 15% fee flat rate, that isn't 100% accurate but it's easy enough to figure and it usually does the trick...

I mean, if I'm selling a $20 item then the fee is $3.

Simple, at that stage I no longer care if the actual fee is slightly off that figure.

[luckythewinner]

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@dnasilver wrote:

Paypal never did on us.

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I think you find that starting in Nov 2019 (I think), the total payment form an eBay sale was sent to your PayPal account, the PayPal fees were calculated on that total amount, and then the sales tax amount was set back to eBay in a separate, subsequent  transaction. 

In your transaction history, you can find these debit transactions by looking for the transaction type " Tax collected by partner" and a reference to trasnsaction involved.  

And if you go back and re-calculate the PayPal fee, you will find it was calculated on the total amount including the sales tax.