I’ve signed up for managed payments and recently I noticed some of my sales looked as if eBay was charging more in their selling fees. For example I had an item sell for $400 and the fee came out to exactly 11.5% + 0.30 ($46.3). This item was not taxed due to the state the buyer was in. I also had an item sell for $324.99 and the fee came back as $39.62 + 0.30 which is larger than 11.5% + 0.30 ($37.67). They charged the final value fee based on the total with tax even though it says on their site that they do not charge selling fees on sales tax for an item. I checked the seller hub expenses to confirm and saw they charged the final value fee for the item that sold for $324.99 as $344.49 which was the item total sales cost after tax. I checked a bunch of my other recent sold listings and noticed the same for them. I just noticed this and have not called eBay yet to ask them about it, but I plan on calling them this week. Please let me know if any of you have noticed the same and if you have asked eBay and what answers they have given.
Here is a screenshot of the fees for the $324.99 and $400.00 sale.
Their idea is that it comes out in the wash so to speak. The final value fee is something like .6 percent lower and the average sales tax is 6 percent. So basically the final value fees will be about the same as before
Yup. Plus you only lose 30 cents on refunds as opposed to the entire PayPal fee (2.9% + 30 cents). And yeah, the FVF are nearly identical for me. And they’re lower than before if the buyer is from a no sales tax state. Overall, I’ve been basically neutral about managed payments. Honestly doesn’t impact anyone much.
It’s true that even if you sell to someone in the city with the highest sales tax, then the fee will be just slightly lower than the previous situation with PayPal. My initial problem is that it says that sales tax isn’t included in the final value fee. Unfortunately, I found another link to selling fees with managed payments and noticed that they changed it there to include sales tax. Here is a link to that: www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/selling-fees?id=4822
It seems I can’t do anything about it then. I do still think it’s wrong that we basically have to pay a fee for eBay to collect tax on our sales.
Yeah, I think it’s a stupid policy. I just don’t even think about FVF, honestly; it’s just something you can’t control, and it’s nice that they now at least automatically deduct it from sales rather than sending you a big fat invoice every month lol. Or at least I prefer it this way. Managed payments was clearly just a way for eBay to get to earn interest on holding billions of dollars in limbo – the way they framed it was kind of deceptive: as a win-win for buyers and sellers. But it ultimately only helps them. Not that this was unexpected, of course.
