PayPal fee does not correspond 4.4% + $0.3.

[alex.a.sha]

Hi there,

I am new to selling on eBay and I learned a lot before opening a selling account.
Before adding a new item to sell I did some math in order to have a better understanding of how much I will get from every sale. And I just figured out that I was charged a bit more than I had to.

Let's take an example of one of the items that I recently sold:

The cost was $74.99 + I charged $14.99 for shipping. So the total payment was $89.98.
Since that was an international sale, PayPal had to charge me for 4.4% + $0.3.

So this means that I had to receive to my PayPal account (before eBay charges its fee) $85.72 ( based on the following calculation: $89.98-4.4%-$0.3).

However, PayPal shows me that the fee of this transaction was $4,71 and that's why after this I received $85,27 that is around $0.45 less than I had to. 

The same happened to the few other transactions - all the time the PayPal fee was a bit more than it has to be.

Can someone of you please explain how this kind of fee should be calculated and why my numbers do not correspond 4.4%+$0.3.

I have a Polish PayPal account.

Thank you!

[slippinjimmy]

@alex.a.sha 

Was this sale shipped to the USA?

eBay charges Sales Tax for most US buyers, although they are responsible for collecting from the buyer and remitting to the State in question the actual amount of the Sales Tax is included in the payment sent to you by the buyer, it is immediately taken out of your PayPal account and sent back to eBay (in the transaction details you should see a tax amount and then a "partner fee" where it is sent along to eBay.

This mans that you are paying the PayPal fees on the sale price plus shipping plus sales tax (mostly 6 - 8% with a few States higher). To make matters even more confusing some States charge Sales Tax on the shipping portion and some don't. This makes it difficult to reconcile your missing 45 cents since I don't know what the rate was or if shipping was taxable.

https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/taxes-import-charges?id=4121

https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/service-and-payments/tax-information.html#ist

[alex.a.sha]

Hi @slippinjimmy 

Thank you for the detailed feedback. I've sold three items on eBay so far - two of them I shipped to the United States and one more to Mexico.
The numbers in my original post are related to the item that has been purchased from Mexico - 45 cents only are missed there.
For another item that I sold to a customer from the United States, I paid $7,36 of the fee (4.4% + $0.3) from the amount of $129,00 + $14.99 shipping. So for this transaction, I was charged for 72 cents more than I had to.

In regard to sales tax - for these two purchases, I did not have information about the tax on my PayPal account, but I had it in the transaction history for another US customer - there was an additional field calls "Tax collected by eBay" and there was $5.00 pointed. As I understand, this $5.00 has been paid by the customer. For this transaction 42 cents are missed.

It sounds a bit confused to me know but there is a sense in what you said, so I will just include an additional dollar to the prices to cover this unexpected fee. 

Thank you for the feedback and time spent on this!
Alex

[rebell45]

Currency exchange fee?