Managed Payments Experience?

If ebay claims there is a "savings" for sellers, you are safe in assuming the exact opposite is true.

It's been stated above but the total fees starting July 20th will be slightly below what they are with PayPal. I've been holding off and glad I have. They added PayPal as an option for buyers and eliminated the 25 cents per transaction (now 30c per full order). What remains I think is the question about records for download and taxes. PayPal does a good job of providing full year records of payments and returns. It was easy to separate out postage etc. I don't know what ebay will provide and won't be surprised if it isn't quite there yet.

In any case, with the fixes so far it doesn't look nearly as bad as when it was first announced and the fees will be slightly lower than PayPal so I'm ready to switch.

I hope you mean we pay 8.5% + 30c total and not 6.15% + 8.5% + 30c = 14.65% + 30c, as that would indeed be cheaper than the current 6.15% + 2.9% + 30c = 9.05% + 30c (at least cheaper for domestic sales, still sounds like international sales will cost sellers more). Of course this assumes they don't change their store subscription fees.

edited again - read some more and see they are charging the 8.6% on the total including sales tax, whereas before we only got charged 2.9% on the sales tax, so the net result is the new fees are virtually the same as before (I calculate a 1c savings on a $7.50 sale).

edited to add - Does the document that you have that I can't seem to access with the links you provide give the fees for international sales also?

I am a smaller seller who does not come close to the reporting level that PP uses, but I sill report my sales to the IRS. Being anal I manually record all my sales, but I still look at the ebay and PP reports. Now maybe I don't know how to use the ebay system, but it seems the choices are either to get things listed by date order or by item number order, but they list the fvf on the sale date but the fee on the shipping on the payment date so you have to search to put the two together, but if you pick item order they put the two fees together however you really have to hunt to find the item.

Rather than 'is this good for what and how I sell' I think the perspective should be, 'on balance for all sellers is this good or bad'? For example, here is an article (last updated 3/23/2020) which describes the pros and cons of the Managed Payments program. https://www.channelreply.com/blog/v...ged-payments

If you and what you sell are not a good fit for the direction that ebay is heading, then it is time to find another venue; no one is being forced to use ebay.
Don

Don,

This is not how I look at it. Selling on ebay is not a choice independent of what potential buyers do. I evaluate sales, cost of sales (including my time) to maximize revenue. If the cost of selling on ebay goes up, I look for other less expensive venues to replace lost income. In practical terms it means that if the cost of selling on ebay goes up, some less expensive stamps and covers move to other venues or stay unlisted. If the cost drops, more items get listed. A few sellers have attempted raise their minimum threshold to over $100 to avoid excessive ebay fees and time spent listing. My threshold keeps moving up, depending on the type of item and cost to list. If most buyers moved to HipStamp, I would focus more effort there. setting up an effective web site is possible, but barriers to entry are high and costs may be high unless substantial sales volume materializes.

What about stamp shows? I have an opinion, but I am waiting until May 15th for an announcement about the August APS show in Hartford.

Back to the issue at hand. As I understand it, ebay will migrate most US sellers to Managed Payments in July. I do not have high expectations. It took ebay more than a year to straighten out sales tax accounting. Although I had believed it to be working, this week I noticed that some old reporting bugs reappeared. Buyers sometimes see invoices with sales tax correctly calculated and sometimes they do not. Moving the sheer volume of sellers in July, given the uncertain state of ebay software will be a daunting task if everything works as hoped. Is there any real planning behind the hope? Or will this be another stumble on the road to corporate oblivion?

Understood.
Although ebay is not holding a candle to Amazon, stockholders clearly do not think that ebay is 'stumbling on the road to corporate oblivion'. At close on Friday it is within reach of its all time high stock price (around $42 at close and its all time high is $43.68). For folks who purchased ebay in 2009 when it was at $4.40 a share, they are ecstatic over ebay's business decisions. This is the opposite than those who have predicted ebay's decline and/or collapse.
It is perfectly clear that ebay has evolved to supporting sellers of new, consumer items. The fact that their direction sucks for our hobby does not mean that ebay is flailing or failing, only that it changing.
Don

No-one is forced, but, as the market has developed, ebay, Amazon and others have quasi-monopoly positions and huge market share - hence the moves towards digital services taxation to address their compulsive tax-dodging. We've made ebay, Amazon, Facebook and others what they are, and now we have to take the often unpleasant consequences.

Really it is quite simple.

It is not a good business plan to be ebay dependent when your a seller.

Clark - thanks for finding the subscriber rate sheet. They are in fact raising prices for stamp sellers - a shame. Of course, there's not much we can do about it at this point.

Another article on the new fee structure for ebay Managed Payments users:

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/bl...8884404.html

Morning all,

I have been following this discussion in the latest chapter of "it costs too much now". Let's put this in a broader perspective over time. The price point at which an item finds a willing buyer on many items is lower than your inventory cost in the item plus the overhead cost of eselling.

I grew up in the days of penny approvals and local stamp shops. We all moaned when the penny became three cents, then five cents, then more. The shops are long gone. The overhead costs of keeping a physical door open became too great just like the cost of doing ebusiness is becoming today. Our financially viable $.99 lots are becoming $2.99 or $4.99 or higher.

Collecting and collectors will be there as long as material at a reasonable, to them, price point remains on the market. The seller's challenge remains being able to make that happen.

True, the internet gives your merchandise more exposure to a geographically wider audience that the old store front. Unique and quality material still brings interested collectors out of the woodwork.

I'm going to wait as long as I can to participate in Managed Payments. I want to give ebay as much time as possible to work out the bugs. My main concern is ebay support. Lately they seem to be incapable of answering simple questions and I am very concerned that they will be completely overwhelmed when it comes to answering technical questions about payments.

Recently I've called ebay twice and both times they referred me to Paypal and in the conversation they said "Paypal is our Payment Agent". Two separate phone reps used this term and it made me wonder if Paypal is going to have a role in the new system? I hope not because communicating with Paypal is awful right now. There is no phone number and questions have to be submitted via chat but it took 18 hours for Paypal chat to get back to me.

I hope ebay postpones this rollout until business opens up.

It looks like the cost will be about the same but it seems unfair that ebay is charging 8.6% to collect sales tax.

???

Is this something new within the last few days? I called PayPal twice last week without any problems.

Count me in the group that thinks that ebay collecting a commission from sellers on sales tax collected is shady AF. To my knowledge, no other sales platform does this. The payment processor (PayPal) charge to the merchant on sales tax collected I get, but not the ebay fee commission.

I still don't understand how hipstamp gets away without collecting sales tax under the recent marketplace law like other venues now have to...

tells you how small hip's sales are

I just had my first experience buying from a seller I managed payments. The email receipt I got from PayPal was far inferior from what I used to get - it does not say what I bought, only the amount (under description it on;y says Purchase Amount).
Not pleased.