Unable To List On Ebay Unless I Sign Up For Managed Payments

I was just "invited" into the program - have to sign up by Jan 22

In the sense that a business-owner in Catania is invited to have The Honoured Society protect his workplace ...

Ouch. I'll refrain from comment about a Catholic business-owner in Belfast being invited to have the British Army protect her.

"Other protective organisations are also available", as the BBC would say.

Welp, all good things must come to an end. They finally roped in all the coin sellers, myself included.

I managed to get my checking account verified by uploading a bank statement. My credit union is too small to appear on their list of "log into your bank account through ebay to connect" banks, which actually is fine by me, since it means that my banking credentials never had to be entered under ebay's systems. It's not that I think that ebay will do anything nefarious, but rather they are so blindingly incompetent that I wouldn't consider my banking credentials safe.

Just got the email that I will be switched over from PayPal to Mangled Payments on Feb. 8, so we'll see how it goes.

I've already found that the seller exports from ebay are utter garbage compared to PayPal exports... my fear is that MP reconciliation will be catastrophically bad come tax time.

Here in Oz it looks like they are finally getting to the bottom of the barrel so to speak. Less than 10 total sales on ebay...............

Got 'invited' to join the program and had a look at some of the terms, conditions, and costs.

It looks like the commission is going up from a little over 10% to over 13% plus that nasty 30 cents per order once you 'join' the program.

It also has that nasty exchange rate fee too if you have a foreign exchange conversion. I wonder if they will charge you that fee too if you have refund a buyer?

And speaking of foreign sales, IIRC it states that you can no longer list on foreign sites. For example, if you have your account in Australia, you can no longer log on to the USA site anymore and list an item there.

In any event, I don't want the folks at ebay to have access to my bank account account data. The entire purpose of using PayPal is to be secure and have that information isolated in the buying and selling process.

Welp, after 3 weeks of being in MP there's both good and bad compared to "the old way". Some of the dissatisfaction is simply adjusting to new methods and workflows. Me no likey change.

In no particular order:

Having to wait almost a week before having access to funds is annoying (if you use daily payouts; if you do weekly, it could be 10+ days depending on when purchases are paid).

This is mitigated somewhat by being able to pay for shipping labels out of pending funds. However, unlike PayPal you can't choose to leave any funds there for future shipping labels; when your scheduled payout day hits, the entire balance is emptied. If there's a way to leave an $X reserve, I've not found it. This means you have to have a backup funding method in place, which defaults to PayPal... but since there's no longer money going into Paypal, that's a bit useless for many people. I have it set to a debit card that pulls from the very bank account that ebay dumps into. The only downside being if you're a low-to-medium volume seller or hit a lull, you could need to pay for shipping labels during periods where your funds are "processing" or the 3-4 business days between when they leave your ebay balance (where they would have been "available" to use for shipping labels), and when the money finally hits your account. For low-volume sellers I would recommend making a credit card your backup funding source if you're not sure you'll maintain a reserve balance in that bank account.

There's currently no way to pay your monthly store subscription fee from available funds in the way you can pay for shipping labels, which is absolutely idiotic. You HAVE to pay monthly store subscription fees using an external payment method. Supposedly this feature is coming, but who knows when.

I like having all of the final value and payment fees removed before I see any money rather than having to pay up at the end of the month. Previously under PayPal, when I had a good month without realizing it, I might be surprised by an unusually high ebay fee bill at the end of the month; this removes that possibility. YMMV as to whether this model fits your preference.

The total FVF + payment fees *ARE* higher under managed payments than PayPal depending on what categories you sell in and what percentage of your sales are international.

The dashboards are a bit discombobulated, resulting in you having to look all over the place depending on what granular bit of information you're looking for.

The .CSV reports are utter garbage compared to those provided by PayPal. I want to slap whoever came up with their report formatting.

The fact that granular transaction reports are still only available for 90 days is highly disturbing. At minimum they should go back one full calendar year, one could argue longer. I've set myself a calendar appointment for the 5th of every month to download the transaction report from the prior month. People who wait to the end of the calendar year to pull information for doing taxes are in for a rude awakening... and given that more and more states are DRASTICALLY lowering the threshold for 1099-K reporting to the IRS, I'm guessing that more than a few casual sellers are scrambling when they didn't plan to...


In a nutshell: It shows promise as being a streamlined integrated payment & order processing workflow, but in typical ebay fashion, what they've thrown out there is still somewhat of a hacked up mess.

Thanks very much for doing this reporting. It's very helpful. Much appreciated.