Haven't sold anything on Ebay in a long time, and just recently got back into it. I find the selling fees confusing, and pretty much deceitful. As an example, I'll use the latest low-cost item I sold. The item price was $4.99, shipping was $3.81, and sales tax was $0.26, for a total sale amount of $9.06.
Ebay's so-called "13%" final value fee (12.9% to be precise) is for some reason applied to ALL of that amount, shipping and tax included. Which means Ebay took $1.17 in fees for this order. (Then there's the extra fixed amount of $0.30 per order which they add on for fun, so the final fees were $1.47). The reason this is very strange to me is because the only amount I received on this order which can actually be called MINE is the item price of $4.99. The shipping money I received is not income for me, because obviously I have to pay back that exact amount in order to print a shipping label. And of course the sales tax is not part of my income either: that's just a tax the buyer paid to Ebay.
But nonetheless, Ebay is taking:
13% of the item price (which IS my money, so this makes sense).
13% of the shipping price (which is NOT my money, so this doesn't make sense).
13% of the sales tax (which is NOT my money, so this doesn't make sense).
So where is Ebay's 13% cut for shipping and sales tax actually coming from? It's ultimately coming out of the item price, the $4.99 I made on the item. And $1.17 is 23.5% of $4.99, not 13%. And again, once you factor in the $0.30 just-for-fun fee, then they took $1.47 which is 29.5%. This is the percentage Ebay actually takes from the sellers themselves.
Surely people have already pointed this out before. And I guess you just have to deal with it, or go sell stuff somewhere else. But it's pretty irritating that Ebay would advertise "13% selling fees," when in reality the percentage is more than double that, almost 30%. In my opinion, companies should have more respect for their users (and more self-respect for that matter). This legitimately has me wondering whether Ebay is worth using.
