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Postage
I feel I am not doing the shipping charges correctly. According to the charges, the buyer is charged the postage and the postage are taken out of my profit also. It seems to me that eBay is getting profit for postage twice. I’ve tried calling and talking to their customer service but they put me on hold a very long time trying to research it. I need help with this.
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monroe67
Mentor9 months agoSo-o-o-o-o-o many new sellers seem to have trouble with this.
It appears to me that you are actually "doing the shipping charges correctly."
I will use your recent sale of a sock monkey as an example to try to help you understand how postage on eBay sales works. Follow the money:
Let's say I bought that sock monkey for your asking price of $15.00, and I also pay the $4.99 your listing shows as the delivery cost, via the US Postal Service (USPS).
For this example, I will assume that the monkey was delivered to a state that does not charge sales tax.
So I pay -- to you, through eBay -- a total of $19.99: $15.00 for the monkey and $4.99 toward the shipping price.
eBay will immediately make $4.99 available to you, the seller, so that you can actually buy the postage.
You, the seller, will buy USPS postage through eBay, using the $4.99 that I, your buyer, already paid to you, through eBay.
See how that works?
Your eBay buyer, in a sense, pre-pays the price of postage/delivery/shipping, $4.99 in this case.
eBay buyers pre-pay the price of postage to eBay sellers, through eBay.
Then you, the eBay seller, use those four dollars and 99 cents ($4.99) to buy the postage, so that the USPS will deliver the item to me, your buyer. The USPS needs to be paid before they will accept anything for mailing. (FedEx and UPS, too.)
eBay is not "getting profit for postage twice." As for eBay's profit, eBay calculates their Final Value Fee (FVF) as a percentage of the total amount paid by the buyer.
eBay's fees are deducted before your order earnings are transferred to your bank account.
In this example, I, your buyer, paid a total of $19.99. eBay's FVF percentage on toys like that monkey is 13.6%, plus 40 cents as a per-order fee: $19.99 x 0.136 = $2.71865, rounded up to $2.72. Plus the $0.40 per order fee = $3.12.