Why I hate eBay and payPal

[Gambit37]

I've just put a load of stuff to sell on eBay, despite the fact that I've had to bite the bullet and accept some terms and conditions that I don't agree with. And I also just discovered that the fees have gone through the roof -- I didn't realise by how much. If I'd known, I might have listed these items differently.

Anyway, first issue:

Personal account vs. Premier Account

Take a look at this page of fees:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?c ... untries=EU

I currently have a personal account which means I can only accept payment from PayPal accounts that have cleared funds from previous transactions, or that have been "loaded" with funds from a bank account. This is considered "clean" money that doesn't cost anything to process it.

If I want to accept credit-card payments, I have to upgrade to a Premier account. But wait -- although credit card payments incure a charge of "1.9% to 3.4% + €0.35 EUR", look at that table again.

Yes, that's right. Once you've upgraded, the charge is levied against ALL TRANSACTIONS, even if they have ome from "clean" sources.

This is one reason why I have never upgraded my acount and insisted that people pay me with cleared funds. However, two problems here

1) This is against ebay terms -- if you offer PayPal, you MUST allow people to pay with a credit card
2) It's incredibly complicated to manage because most buyers are dumb and it's simply not worth the time and effort required to pursue

I made a decision with this latest round of selling to bite the bullet and accept that I will need to upgrade and will therefore have to pay more. I don't like it and as a point of principal, I hate that I relented, but as most eBayers tend to pay using credit cards via PayPal, it seemed I would be cutting my nose off to spite my face if I didn't accept it.

So, the next issue:

eBay / PayPal fees

It's been a while since I sold and I hadn't noticed how eBay have changed their fees for "media" items.

If you don't already know, when you sell something on eBay, you're charged two fees: an "insertion" fee and a "final value fee". The insertion fee is paid when you list the item, the FVF is paid when the item sells.

Insertion fees for basic items start at £0.15 and go up to £3.00 depending on the initial value you set your item to sell at.

But for media items, (books, CDs, DVDs, etc), there is a flat fee of £0.10. Pretty good -- until you realise that the FVF applied to these items is 9%. NINE FUCKING PERCENT!

The FVF for standard items selling for less than £30 is 5.25%, while between £30-£600 it's 5.25% on the first 29.99 and then 3.25% on the remainder.

So, here's a typical scenario for selling an audio CD.

I list a CD at £1 starting bid -- this is a good opener because research has shown starting higher puts people off bidding.

So consider that I sell the CD at that price (hardly worth it I know, but stay with me)

Listing fee is : £0.10
Final Value Fee is : 9% of £1.00 = £0.09
---------------------------
Cost so far: 19p = 19% the value of my sale

Then, if someone pays me using a credit card via PayPal, the cost to me is calculated from these figures:

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/websc ... untries=EU

So in this case, I'll be charged 3.9% + 20p

Cost of item: £1.00
PayPal fee: £0.04 + 20p = £0.24

Total Cost of eBay fee + payPal fee = £0.43

So it has cost me 43% of my sale price to sell via eBay using credit payments via PayPal.

I always knew it was crazy to sell low value items using eBay, but this has really opened my eyes.

So, for the rest of my auctions, I'm going to be using eBid. Although they have a much, much smaller audience, there costs are far more reasonable at just 3% of the final value fee and NO INSERTION COSTS. The downside is that you have to pay up front for a membership, but in some ways I think this is fairer if you're doing a lot of selling.

[Sophia]

Oh, and the "best" part of all of this is that PayPal's supposed "fraud protection" is more fraud than protection. A popular scam is to pay for something with a credit card with PayPal, and then file a chargeback once the goods have been shipped. PayPal will then simply deduct the money from the seller's account-- and that's the end of that. As you say, you're forced to allow credit card transactions, so you can't head this off.

More horrors:
http://www.paypalsucks.com/

[Gambit37]

Yeah, I've read that site quite a few times in the past and have opened and closed Paypal accounts depending on the need for bigger audiences.

Once this round of selling is out of the way, I'm definitely looking at alternatives!