@buyselljack2016 wrote:
You sell your item for $35 with $15.50 shipping.
I sell my item for $50.50 with free shipping.
Who should pay a higher FVF?
Levels the playing field.
Actually that's not where the uneven playing field comes in. The unfairness is when a seller must pay more in shipping expenses than a seller of another item at the same price that costs much less to ship.
For example, a seller of a $35 item with $15.50 shipping costs pays Final Value Fees on $50.50. A seller of a $35 item with $4 shipping costs pays Final Value Fees on $39. Who should pay a higher FVF?
The answer, of course, is Neither. If the actual cost of shipping is deducted from the buyer's payment before Final Value Fees are calculated, then both sellers are paying Final Value Fees on $35, which is the amount they actually collected from the sale. (If one seller wants to gouge the buyer with excess Shipping charges, he's still going to pay the FVF on his inflated price because only the actual postage is deducted.)
Now, having said all that, these complaints are simply beating the greasy spot in the road where the dead horse used to be. eBay stated several years ago now (in one of their Q&A chats with management) that although deducting the actual shipping cost from the buyer's payment (which could be done if the seller bought the Shipping label through eBay) would indeed level the playing field, they had no plans to do that.
I think at the time they said it was mainly due to nervousness about revising existing site code, and they do have a long history of botched upgrades and revisions that they would not want to make any worse, but the bottom line in any case was they were not going to consider that correction. To this day they keep the math simple by applying the FVF to the buyer's payment, regardless of the embedded expense of a postage cost, and that's the way it is probably going to remain.
