Paypal fees

Hi.
This isn't the best place to do it, but a search on ebay only returned "paypal settlement fees".
Since people have experience with ebay, could you tell me if I have to state that the buyer pays paypal fees?
Two of my listings just ended (for the base price... yupi-do) and neither buyer paid fees.
What a great start... Barely worth the hassle...

I'm pretty sure you aren't allowed to put that clause on an ebay auction, it's the sellers responsibility to pay the fees.

The only real way of doing it is to bump up the starting price.
I never start my items of lower than they are worth, if they don't sell then hey ho, that's life, may re-list, may sell somewhere else.

I have never charged buyers for the PayPal fee. Why not accept chqs or cash only, don't send them until payment has been completed

As of about 3 years ago, sellers could specify who paid the paypal fees. Then ebay bought paypal and about six months later introduced a new rule...the seller HAS to pay the paypal fees. This is actually in the paypal terms & conditions, which EVERYONE has to abide to when they sign up to use paypal.

cheers Steve.

The buyer does not pay PayPal fees. The whole point is that payment is secure and free for the buyer. The advantage to the seller is quick payment and the very fact that PayPal is offered makes buyers more likely to bid.

Just make sure your items attract a price that makes selling them worthwhile. You can have a higher starting price, for example, the logic being that if only that one buyer is interested then they might as well pay £10 as 99p!

Try again, it can be worthwhile once you get to learn the ropes.

"Why not accept chqs or cash only"

....on ebay you cannot do that either. As of about a year ago, all ebay sellers HAVE to offer paypal..which means in effect that sellers have to take it, whether they want to or not. If you fail to accept a paypal payment from a buyer, or refund one and ask for different payment, you are infringing ebay terms & conditions and ebay can terminate your listings, or basically throw you off if they wish to.

Oooooh I never knew that as I have always used PayPal as chqs and cash are a pain in the A**
I guess that now ebay owns PayPal that's when that rule came in

It's a mixture of things I suppose. PayPal is owned by eBay, so naturally they want you to use it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't something that stops them from being able to insist on it. They only insist you include the option, and to be fair it is safer than cash or cheque.

I would pay by PayPal for an expensive item, but I would be more wary of sending a cheque, waiting for it to clear and maybe waiting for the item forever. Shim has already been a victim of the pitfalls on another thread.

A lot of sellers now are putting higher P&P charges on, you don't get charged on ebay for that.

So an item worth £3 costing £1 to post often goes up at £1 starting bid and £3 postage. This means that the seller only pays on £1, not £3.

Watch ebay stop this soon!

I hate it when the postage is whacked up, that really puts me off an item so i end up not bidding for that.

Thanks for the replys. I was unaware of this.

One can put a bit more on the starting price. It all comes together in the fact that we have a minimum price we would like to get for the item.

For the case of the sigma I got the minimum price...
For the other lens, I thought 0.99 would atract people, but no... Sold for 0.99... I wasn't expecting much, but come on...

Anyway such is life on ebay.

I now have the Tokina SD on there. Lets see how it goes.

Don't forget the seller as well when it comes to postage!

As an example, there is now a £2.75 limit on postage in the UK for a fiction book. If that happens to be a whacking great hardback on heavy paper that costs over £5 to post then it's just hard luck for the seller.

So the asking price has to go up.

It is strictly against eBay rules to surcharge for PayPal fees, so don't do it unless you want to get banned. A discount for cheque payment is allowable (as far as I can tell), so you could try that way if your start price is high enough.

Hi,

John, I disagree wholly with the farcical p+p max rates now applied by ebay in regard to books, since in many cases they are simply barmy. However, this reply by you is incorrect:

"As an example, there is now a £2.75 limit on postage in the UK for a fiction book"

There is a higher max p+p rate allowable for 'antiquarian & collectable' books...I think this rate is about £4.75...and many fiction books can easily fall into that category.

I recently used that category to sell some books myself.

cheers Steve.

My reply was incomplete rather than incorrect, just to make a simple example without getting bogged down by the detail.

But you are quite correct that Antiquarian & Collectable books have a higher, still unrealistic I think, limit. That assumes you want your book to be in that section which may miss some valuable keyword searches for yoyr item. If it's suitable though, that's fine.

For photographic books you can use Photography>Books, Manuals & Magazines instead and there is no limit to postage in that section. Which is a good thing considering some of the monster-sized tomes I have sold recently!