can not pay for items

[floriantet]

The issue happens pretty randomly, with items won auction-style, low prices.

When it happens: If I pay with a credit card I get the message "your order is in" but each time in my Orders shows “Payment pending” and after a few minutes are back in my unpaid items: "Your payment didn't go through. Please go to your unpaid items to pay for the item again". This is a false error message as there is no problem on my side, see below). I try again and it is the same. If I try with PayPal I get “We ran into a problem and PayPal isn't available right now. Please select a different payment option.” If after PayPal I try with an eBay Gift Card I get “You can't apply gift cards, coupons, or eBay Bucks at this time.” If I restart the check-out process from home page and try the eBay Gift Card from the beginning I get "your order is in". Item is no longer in my cart, is under orders, I have no unpaid items but after a while is back in my unpaid items (and eBay Gift Card was not charged).
For people eager to come with suggestions, I already had a lot of them (pay only one item at the time, pay for all, remove PayPal account, add back PayPal account, ...) from countless times I called customer service since January:

• Do not tell me to ask the seller for an invoice (preferred method of eBay customer service to get rid of me) as I did that on a few items with the same issue and it didn’t change anything
• Do not tell me to check if it is a problem with my payment methods as I am able to pay for other items, before and after, using any of my payment methods: All work for other items, none work with the items with the issue, including PayPal with PayPal balance, eBay gift card !!!
• Do not tell me it is a seller problem because I had a few times in my cart 2 (or more) items from the same seller (both won auction-style, similar items) and I was able to pay for one but not for the other one. Also as eBay customer service suggested, I have contacted the sellers and their answer was invariable “we have checked and everything is ok on our side”.

Please write a suggestion here only if you had this issue and you got it solved.

This issue started in January and it is like I am playing a lottery: After I won an item, will I be able to pay for it or not ?

I am tired of talking with customer service, they don’t know why or how to solve this issue, all they can do is later erase the record of an unpaid item from my account.

I have a feeling that this is tax-related as it started in January after eBay started collecting taxes and recently I was able to pay for an item won with 1 cent (no tax during check-out) and I was not able to pay for an item won with 10 cents (+1 cent tax = 11cents) from the same seller.

I cannot believe that eBay was not able to solve it from January, what is going on ?
Is there anyone from eBay who can actually debug this issue or put me in contact with someone who can debug the issue ? (maybe someone from developing team ?)

[floriantet]

Until now I believed it happens only with sellers from other countries, but I just got one from a seller from US

of course the original listing has all:

[chunkeih]

I too had this same exact problem for at least a year, and after so many (I lost count already) conversations with ebay/PayPal they could never find out why. 

What @floriantet and @comics-scifi-collectibles have said are both correct. This got to have something to do with the added tax ebay started doing since last year. In my case, any items priced at $0.04 or lower will go through-since there won't be any tax added. The origin of the seller doesn't matter, I bought items from a seller for $0.02, but failed for the ones priced at $0.05 (it would add 1 cent of tax). To get through this, I tried buying more of the same $0.05 items from the same seller to bring it to $0.35 and it worked ($0.30 didn't work) !!!!

To sum up, just make sure the price doesn't fall between $0.05 to $0.30ish. I would assume you can ask the seller to add shipping fee to make the total a bit higher? This is just frustrating-I have been a loyal customer to ebay for 10-15 years and ebay just doesn't care.

[floriantet]

After more than one year this issue is still going strong "thank you eBay!" so yes it is a tax-related issue (also issue started when eBay started collected taxes).

My state tax is 6%  and from the same seller I can pay items up to 0.08 because the tax is 0.0048 and it gets rounded to 0, therefore I can do a check-out paying 0.08.

From the same seller if I win an item with 0.11 the tax at check-out is 0.01 and total $0.12 and I can not pay.  For items with the total starting somewhere up towards $1 (price+shipping), the issue does not occur. So I think it is safe to say you can expect this issue to appear for items between $ 0.08 and $1

So the conclusion is that if you want an item you need to win it either below $0.08 or above $1 (total price)

So bid accordingly because if this went on for more than a year it is very likely eBay will never solve this issue...