If you are one to just pay Ebay invoices as they come in and don’t look at every transaction, you might not notice that the fees got a little higher recently. Especially for people who don’t sell on Ebay on a regular basis, this might seem normal. However, you might be losing money overall on shipping after you take into account their final shipping value fee.
What is the final shipping value fee? It is another way for Ebay to make some money off those who sell, but they don’t advertise this fee. It apparently was started in March or April 2011, but only those who actively sold that month supposedly got an email or notification that this fee would start. But for anybody who signed up after that email or didn’t happen to sell in that month, those people weren’t notified and are therefore completely in the dark about this fee. If you go to basic selling fees so you can understand what you might need your item to sell at to see if it’s worth it, there is no mention on the website about the final shipping value fee. Forget about trying to get it refunded as when you call Ebay (as there appears to be no way to email them anymore) the customer service rep tells you it’s a legitimate charge even though it’s not advertised and you weren’t notified about it so they won’t credit your account.
Why is there a final shipping fee? The customer service rep said that it was started because it came to their attention that many people were charging too much for shipping so it was an effort to try and have sellers not overcalculate shipping charges. Does this make sense to you? The way to curb that behavior is to penalize those sellers who do so or set maximum shipping charges and certainly not by charging another 10% on just the shipping fee to all sellers. So what this forces all sellers to do is to increase the shipping and overcharge the customer so they can now cover their shipping fees, which is the complete opposite of Ebay’s stated goal. The bottom line is they were losing out on money sellers charged for shipping and wanted a piece of the pie. At least they could be honest!
Is it still worth it to sell on Ebay? Look at it mathematically as some categories do have a price maximum on shipping, which doesn’t even cover the original shipping charges in the first place. The Skylander starter pack is apparently in a category that no matter if you put in media mail, parcel post, or regular shipping, the maximum you are allowed to charge for shipping is $4.00. Before the USPS price hike, it was $4.44 to send this starter pack by Media mail so now it will be closer to the $4.75 price point to mail this package media. If you go parcel post, you are closer to $9.00 and yet Ebay doesn’t allow you to actually put in the shipping cost. But then you need to be able to take their 10% fee to account so the least amount that you could charge for shipping is $5.23 but you can’t put more than the $4.00. Just be aware that you now need to sell your item for 1.23 more just to cover the increase in shipping and shipping value fees as this doesn’t even take into account the Paypal fee as well as Ebay’s final value fee.
Some of you might not notice that extra 10% out of your shipping taken out and some might be able to create enough of a cushion so you don’t lose money on shipping, but this penalizes the Ebayers who are actually fair with the shipping cost. An example is I charged $8.00 shipping and handling, but had to pay $10.00 to get it to its destination. I then noticed the extra .80 charge in the transactions so before any other fees associated with the sale, I was already $2.80 in the hole from shipping. So the moral of the story is that I was told to charge more for shipping by Ebay itself to ensure I am not negative on shipping and also charge an extra 10% to cover the final value shipping fee. That’s a great way to try to curb sellers from overcharging on shipping, Ebay! Get rid of the fee, stop being greedy and actually act like you care about your buyers and sellers.
