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Final value fee on shipping and tax?
This is insane. Ebay has increased their fee by 30% by including the shipping and tax in the full amount they use calculate the final value fee.
How do they justify this?
I am losing roughly 18% of my sale price.
This is not right
12 comments
evil.stig
OP3 years agoExcept that it goes completely against common sense and basic decency to charge sales fees that include the shipping and tax, which is why this is the most common issue people post about here.
Plus , in my case, I instructed the buyer to wait till I sent the invoice. I have no idea what the actual shipping will be until I get a shipping quote from a freight company. It may be twice as much, which means eBay will happily charge me 13.25% of $500 …..
I will just to cancel the sale.
It’s not worth sell heavy items on eBay.
wooden_flower
Mentor3 years agoIt is fairly standard for marketplaces to charge their rates on the full amount, and completely standard for payment processors to use the payment total. So sellers may not like it, but the practice is here to stay.
The cancellation will cause a defect on your account, but it sounds like that is a price you are willing to pay. Make sure to select ‘I am out of stock/I can’t complete the transaction’ as the reason for cancellation - no point in getting reported for a policy violation by selecting either of the other reasons.
evil.stig
OP3 years agoI will contact the buyer and see what he wants to do. I gave instructions in the ad for the buyer to wait for an invoice until the shipping was calculated.
Thank you for your input.
wooden_flower
Mentor3 years agoYou are welcome.
BTW, eBay makes no claim that the fee is 13% of the item - the charts clearly state that the % is based on the transaction total. So it is relevant.
kensgiftshop
·3 years agoThe shipping was already done, it had $250 flat rate and that's what the buyer pays.
evil.stig
OP3 years agoThere is no option for making the shipping variable on a freight option when listing an item and no way to know how much shipping will be until the buyer provides an address.
The instructions in the ad need to be what the agreement is, not ebays reductive listing tools.
evil.stig
OP3 years agoI understand their self serving logic, but charging everyone exorbitant fees on money they don’t earn (shipping and tax) with the excuse that it is to offset the few people that were evading fees by low sales prices and inflated shipping, is just a dishonest manipulation of the situation to make money dishonesty.
I sold a heavy item that has a high shipping amount of $250.
the item sold for $950.
‘’between taxes and shipping, I am being charged on over $300 that I neither control nor profit from.
I will receive less than $800 of my $950 sale.
This just tells me eBay is not the place to sell heavy items.
‘I will cancel the transaction and sell locally on principle if eBay does not correct this.
wooden_flower
Mentor3 years agoIt is not going to change. If they changed it, the %s would go up, the fee would not go down.
You need to take all of the fees into account when you set your selling price. eBay does not hide the fact that fees are charged on the total from the buyer.
wooden_flower
Mentor3 years agoActually they have not increased their fees 30%. The fee applied to the shipping starting more than a decade ago, eBay reduced the %s to allow for the % on the shipping.
A few years ago when the sales tax was added to the calculation, eBay again lowered the %s to account for applying the fee to the tax.
So while you may be paying 18% of the item price in fees on some items, it is only slightly more than a few years ago on average.
woodland_gnome
·3 years agoeBay acts as both a selling venue and a payment collection, and sellers pay fees for both functions. Back when PayPal handled most payment processing it based its fee on the total amount collected from the buyer, as do all payment processors that I am aware of, but eBay based it's "Final Value Fees" on only the price plus shipping fees the buyer paid (years ago it was only on the price but too many sellers evaded the fees by inflating the s/h while deflating the price). When eBay took over both functions it combined both fees into a single fee (which confusingly they continued to call "Final Value Fees") and decided the single fee would be based on the total payment but reduced the rate to lower than the prior total of the two rates.
lady_madonna
Mentor3 years ago@evil.stig
Ebay charges 13.25% final value fees in most categories, based on the total amount the buyer pays (includes shipping charges & sales tax), NOT "18%".
evil.stig
OP3 years agoeBay inflates the amount they are charging sellers by including the shipping and tax in their calculations.
‘The total amount in the transaction is irrelevant to the sale price.
If shipping is as much as the item price, then they have effectively doubled their fee to over 26% by including the shipping.