I took a break from eBay for the last few months (have been a user for over a decade) and was forced to enroll in “Managed Payments”. What other differences should I be aware of as a seller, for those of you that have been using it for awhile? Here’s what I’ve surmised so far:
Payments deposited to bank account (no PayPal) . . . how long does it take?
Slightly lower final value fee (30 cents + percentage of sale price)
Sellers charged new “International Fee” on oversees sales (this caught me by surprise)
eBay refunds final value fee for buyer cancellation (unlike PayPal)
I appreciate any additional tips or guidance anyone has to offer! Thanks!
For payments being deposited into your bank account, you can choose to either have it deposited daily or weekly. I personally chose weekly but it’s really up to personal preference.
The total fees are only very slightly lower than they used to be. For most categories, eBay now takes 12.35% instead of 10% (unless you have a store in which case it is now 11.15% instead of 9.15% for most categories) plus 30 cents. So it’s really only about 0.6% lower than it was.
Buyers now have more ways to pay including apple and Google pay, but that doesn’t really effect sellers to much.
They now charge you a flat $20 fee if a buyer wins a case against you which is ridiculous.
Overall, the general opinion seems to be that it is inferior to the old system (at least for sellers), but again that is really up to each seller to decide. I hope this helps!
You can set the schedule for when they deposit the funds. I get daily deposits, which probably makes the most sense (I’m not sure why anyone would prefer weekly deposits).
The FVF is NOT always lower. At first, it would appear that way since it’s now 12.35% + 30 cents per transaction rather than the previous 10% + a PayPal fee of 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. But they also now charge FVF on the total sale price (including sales tax paid by the buyer that you never receive) whereas the previous 10% FVF was on the item pre-sales tax. So the FVF can be lower or higher than it was previously, depending on what sales tax your buyer paid. Overall, it’s probably a wash.
I don’t do direct international shipping (I only use GSP), so I can’t comment much on this. But I will say that I don’t see any additional fees for GSP sales, so that appears to be a way around it.
They refund the 12.35% portion of the FVF, but they don’t refund the 30 cents. Still, it’s better than losing the 30 cents plus 2.9% as was previously the case.
It’s slow to the bank account. Doesn’t matter too often for me, but I have noticed my weekly deposits take about a 2-3 period to clear into my bank account. With Paypal I used to be able to transfer to my bank account in the late evening and have it in my bank account about 12 hours later the next morning. It could be an issue if someone was fire sale-ing things to pay a bill and had an expectation that they’d have it next day.
Like several people already said, my biggest issue is with the daily/weekly deposits and how long they take to clear. I liked to let my PayPal balance build up to $1000 and then make a transfer.
Other than the $20 charge against you if you lose a case, are there any other major changes?
I would need to read all the fine details again but I don’t think they are capping fees. I think up to $2,500 on Pokemon cards is the 11 or 12% or whatever depending on power seller status or store status etc. After that they are charging a fee percentage wise similar to what PayPal charged. So this might be a bit less than what you would normally get charged yet since PayPal didn’t cap fees.
I’m not too excited about the payment system, I don’t know if holidays count as the 2 day time period. For example if you sold something last Thursday, business day 1 would be Friday and (Monday 9/7/2020) is a holiday here in the US, would business day 2 be on Tuesday?
I don’t know if this was the policy before but I saw if they see you giving any details about usernames from other websites or contacting people outside of eBay they will charge you a 5% fee for that listing.
Re: the capping of fees – you’re correct. You pay the normal fee percentage on the first $4,000 of a given sale, and then 2.5% on the portion of the sale above $4000. Sort of like the reverse of a progressive tax.
Re: holidays – they appear to count as business days. Or at least I just received a payment right now, so it appears that the banks are still processing deposits today.
Re: the previous policy – I explained the story in better detail in a recent post on this forum, but early this year (like February-ish?) I was charged the full FVF (~10%) on a sale that eBay ‘caught’ me conducting outside of eBay. So if that’s only 5% now, that’s cool. Although if all it takes is stating a username for them to charge you 5% (regardless of whether or not you actual sell the item off the site), then that’s kind of crazy. Ultimately, I just flat-out don’t give out my usernames from other sites via eBay messages anymore. The buyer should be the one who does it, since the seller has the additional risk of being charged by eBay. And it’s ultimately not something that should even be done unless the item is very high value, where avoiding the fees would actually be worth the risk of eBay suspending your account. I’ve had people try to get me to work off-eBay deals on $200 items, though, which is not even remotely worth the risk.
i read some of the fine prints from eBay on this matter. ultimately, eBay stands to benefit from this. the fee rate between eBay and Paypal is pretty much negligible, but the $20 penalty, removal of the fee cap, and all this other crap is going to make the seller experience worse overall.
however, there is really nothing you can do when there is no competitor in this situation…
eBay’s profiting an insane amount from this. They get to hold tens of billions of dollars in limbo and earn interest on it. I’m shocked they didn’t institute something like it earlier – they were missing out on so much free money when funds went directly to a seller’s PayPal balance. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really affect much on the seller-side. The only way it could be a huge negative for a seller is if you need/want to immediately spend the money you earn.
And yeah, nothing’s going to replace eBay at this point. There’s just no good reason to switch to any other platform as either a seller or a buyer since everything happens on eBay. Overall, I do think it’s a pretty solid platform, though. The one thing I wish they would change is the 30 cents per transaction charge. It makes selling a high volume of low-value items basically not viable. They should give sellers a flat-fee alternative like PayPal does, IMO.
For my situation Instagram has totally replaced eBay. I only sell an average of 2 things a month on eBay. So far this year I’ve sold nearly a million dollars thanks to Instagram. And for me it’s pretty much fee free.
Yes I’m careful and because of that I’ve had zero negative transactions.
Fair enough, though I think you’re a bit of a unique case since you’re selling a lot of individually high-value items. If you’re just trying to piece out 1st edition WotC non-holo sets, eBay is probably better for that. But for selling $25k+ items, I can definitely see how Instagram could be a better platform.
Considering the fact that you only have like 10 Items listed on eBay right now, I’d say selling 2 / Month is actually really good! That’s like selling 20% of your eBay Inventory / Month Hahaha
In all seriousness though, I haven’t been able to make the switch to eBay’s Managed Payments being that I’ve been stuck on a ship for what seems like eternity; but, I’d echo @zorloth I’m hoping eBay will eventually implement something similar to PayPal in-terms of offering a micro-payment fee structure - kind of doubtful of that actually happening though…
Right Now, it’s impossible to sell a single-card for $0.99 (Free Shipping) and be profitable. You’re basically just operating under the assumption that you’ll have more customers purchase 2+ $0.99 Cards vs. those that just purchase 1x $0.99 Card throughout the course of a week / month (which usually is the case)… I’ve always operated my eBay Business with a good portion of my listings being $0.99 Cards. I’d actually considered expanding upon that “business model” and upgrading my eBay Store to an Anchor Store so that I could go ham with listing EVERYTHING. Now I’m wondering if I should just send majority of those $0.99 Cards to T&T to sell on their platform.
One thing that I noticed in the fine print is that along with if you lose a case they charge you $20, but by agreeing to managed payments, you also give them permission to make the automatic withdrawal from your bank account for the amount in the case that you lose.
Hahaha