Paypal Fees On Sales Tax

No I'm not in managed payments. Some of my customers complain about sales tax but in my weekly business I don't see the charges, I send an Invoice and ebay apparently adjusts it and then intercepts the sales tax portion and my Paypal account only shows my portion. I can run a report to see who paid but that's the only way I see sales tax.

This is the announcement that rolled out November 4 when I noticed the change:
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Annou...a-p/30387904

Notably, it doesn't mention the impact of the processing fees.

I see it in my "manage orders awaiting shipment" where there is a "sold" column and a "total" that includes shipping and tax, it now has a little "i" information button that when you hover on it says "Includes ebay collected tax. We'll automatically deduct the tax amount from you via PayPal."

You have to look at your paypal transactions to see that you are being charged processing fees on your money and on ebay's.

It took me a while but I finally get it;





Those sneaky dogs, but I'd still rather pay them a small Paypal fee than do it myself. I did think ebay's sales tax collection was free but the process seems to be evolving.

Yeah, I wish they had been open and upfront about this, but this is ebay. They are NEVER honest with anyone.

I also agree that the nominal cost is preferable to having to track it all myself... but there's a bit of a disconnect here. ebay is the one doing the sales tax collecting and reporting, and PayPal (now a separate company entirely) is gaining the benefit, however nominakl... which tells me that in all likelihood there will be across-the-board seller fee increases down the line to pay for ebay's sales tax collection.

It'll add up to several hundred dollars a year for me. Paypal may get the revenue but the root source is ebay pushing the tax money through my transaction with the buyer.

I agree that ebay collecting tax is easier than having to administer it myself, but the kicker is that left to myself I wouldn't have the tax liability at all, except in Ohio. (which I quite happily collected and administered on my own before ebay took that over too, and now it's a mess because I still have to track it).

It is all so demonstrative of how the true financial impact of a tax is so much more than the bare rate. Collection and compliance adds a significant amount of additional burden.

Well the entire payment is going to Paypal, including the tax. So technically Paypal did indeed process the tax money. Paypal must be remitting it back to ebay, or the states, after.

You'd be entirely correct if you were running your own website, but by using ebay's platform, you're subject to any laws/rules/regulations that govern facilitated marketplaces like ebay. The alternative would be to leave ebay and start up your own website, but I suspect most sellers won't do that as the benefit of being part of ebay's marketplace outweighs the downsides.