eBay

untriskadeka · ‎04-17-2023

What the freak Ebay? How can you legally get away with this? This comes to almost an extra 1% of fees for the entire order...this is Robbery! How can collect fees on Sales Tax....Tax is money that goes directly to the state....so we think....unless somehow ebay gets a kickback from each state.. which I am sure they do.

dbfolks166mt · ‎04-17-2023

There are hundreds if not thousands of posts just like this on this forum. First it is perfectly legal and eBay is not the only one doing it. Credit Cards charge merchant fees on the entire amount of a purchase. If you pay with a CC at a restaurant the CC company charges the merchant on the meal price, sales tax and tip if put it on the CC. With regards to the sales tax following is my canned answer that I post to every one of these.

I have always considered the eBay FVF's on sales tax to be the best accounting bargain around. If you sell a $100 item to a buyer in a state with 8% sales tax the FVF on the $8.00 in sales tax amounts to 13.25% * $8.00 or $1.08 if you are promoting at 2% that adds another $.16 so the total FVF on the sales tax is $1.24.

For that $1.24 eBay keeps track of the 10,000 various state, county, city, parish, municipality..... sales tax rates and laws and applies and collects the proper sales tax from the buyer. They then remit those collected funds to the 45 states with sales tax laws on whatever periodic basis is required. There is NO WAY I want to take on that burden as a seller for $1.24 out of a $100 sale. "

soh.maryl · ‎04-17-2023

Why would you believe that eBay gets a "kickback" from each state?

Do you also believe the same about WalMart, Target, CVS and every other business that collects state sales tax? How about that local restaurant?

And do you want to take over the job of collecting state sales tax for thousands of different taxing entities? Really?

secondlifetreasures-llc · ‎04-17-2023

This post again. People post this same question daily. It is not "robbery". Did you read the terms and conditions before you created your account? Did you look over the fee structure before listing an item? Because it clearly states that fees are assessed as a percentage of the item's "final value". A few things to point out: 1.) eBay collects and remits sales tax to thousands of entities based on the buyer's state and county. That is a courtesy to you. You could be doing all that paperwork instead. I'm sure the pennies of fees on sales tax eBay takes is very small in comparison to how much you would be paying someone to do the same thing. 2.) Assessing a fee on the entire amount of the payment being processed is an industry standard when it comes to payment processing. When you swipe your credit card at a store, the merchant is also paying a fee on the entire amount processed, including the sales tax. All in all, eBay has been doing it this way for years, so I'm not sure why I am seeing people complaining about this every single day. Either lots of new sellers or people just finding out now that it's been like this.

maxine*j · ‎04-17-2023

If you are actually interested in learning about this, start by reading some of the hundreds and hundreds of other threads on the topic:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?advanced=false&allow_punctuation=false&q...

As for "kickbacks": Some states do let merchants keep a tiny bit of the tax they collect and remit, to help offset the costs of doing so. Every state that does this also caps the total amount that can be kept annually, and the caps are in the mere hundreds of dollars. Other states do not let merchants keep one penny. Merchants are unpaid, or merely nominally paid, tax collectors and for every one of them it is work and outgo that they'd be very happy to be free of.