Ebay Bidding Rules - Changed?

Correct, it is the 'default' avatar. If a member has not previously selected an avatar and do not want to display any avatar, they can simply go into their profile and change the avatar to 'None'.
Don

It wasn't there last week, and I never even knew what an avatar was but I don't have one. I think it's confusing.

It was there last week. I had noticed it one or two days before I posted my remark in the other thread on the 21st of this month (December 2023). This was one of the profiles that made me aware of it. I had not noticed it earlier, but it may have been there for several weeks already.

How this topic has morphed!

Anyway, I would still like to hear from other members who may be registered in countries other than the USA, but have a US mailing address and can no longer place bids on ebay.com. Surely I can't be the only one.

About 10 days ago I found that my password would not work. I sent in an email and shortly thereafter my passwrod resumed working and the default avatar appeared without any action on my part.I had submitted an avatar request many years ago and it was not posted, so have continued without one.

John,
I cannot find your original request in the 'Support' category, but it may be that the request predates the implementation of that forum. If desired, please post a request with the desired image.

In the meantime, I have edited your profile to the 'None' avatar so you do not have to.
Don

As a seller I can confirm that it was fairly common for International buyers to use a US address and I never had any problem shipping to them.

Thank you KRelyea. Yes it worked just fine for 23 years and then this week for some reason someone changed a setting and now the bidding process zeros in on the account registration address rather than the "ship to" address". The "Chat" representative couldn't explain why. Hopefully more and more people will complain and it will go back to the way it was.

In the USA ebay must collect taxes based up the location of the IP address, not the shipping address. For example if you live in California, near the border of Nevada, you could have a Nevada PO Box for shipping for many companies that stops internet sales taxes because Nevada does not (yet) collect state sales taxes on internet purchases. BUT California say the IP address is in California and ebay needs to do sale computation and collection.

So ebay may now be doing the same with country of origin IP addresses. Your US mailing address does not have a US IP address for properly calculating sales taxes in the USA. Of course Canada also feels entitled to their taxes on your Canada based purchases and but some pressure on ebay as well.

You solution is to have a fried in the USA to handled your purchasing and then they can ship your material to them of you can pick it from them in person.




Good luck with that, millions of complaints about sudden US State Sales Tax Collection were (appropriately) ignored.

As you are probably aware, there is ebay.ca where many of the US seller also list.

Now if you have been a good customer, explain the issue to the seller and then they may decide it is worth shipping to Canada with a caveat, Canadian Buyer must be pre-approved by the seller" to limit the Canadian shipments.


All that said, lets just hope it is a temporary software bug.

I understand what you are saying, and that may be the root of the problem. However, I disagree with the IP address being the source of tax calculation. Up until this week, any ebay purchase that I made on ebay.com and had it sent to Washington State had WA state taxes applied, not Canadian taxes. Any order I place on ebay.ca has Canadian taxes applied regardless of from where I purchase it.

In addition to that, ebay's recommendation of opening a second account, this time on ebay.com and using my US mailing address to solve the problem would have nothing to do with my IP address. I can also take my laptop across the border and have a US IP address from wherever I connect, so if ebay is suddenly using the IP address to determine what taxes to collect, good luck!!

I don't believe this is accurate. The sales tax rate used is based upon where the item is being shipped.

I have multiple street addresses saved in ebay and the sales tax calculated during checkout will change in real time as I change the ship-to address. My po box has a different rate than my home address, and my mother's address in another state triggers a third rate.

Those would not change if the sales tax was being calculated based upon my IP address.

I agree with revenuecollector. Anything that I have ordered and sent to CA had California taxes applied and as already stated, anything I had sent to WA had Washington taxes applied. The IP address has remained the same.

Well shipping address it is then....

Interestingly my street address is so rural there is no and never has been mail delivery by either the USPS nor the USPOD.

I also get taxed at my "home" rate when using a Nevada address.

Best yet, ebay calculates my "free shipping" from one seller as if I am outside of the USA and Canada.. The seller always has to fix it. He has USA, Canada, and Everywhere else free shipping based upon purchase levels, with the lowest being USA then Canada and lastly everywhere else.


Edit:
Then again, I am in California, the tax everything and give it all to politicians and their progressive democratic socialist pipe dreams of betterment of the world. Tax paying folks are leave so fast that at one time California floated an exit tax on the leaver's income for ten years, no matter where they moved out of state. Then next tax year, 2024 has a projected deficit of $68 Billion and rising weekly.

Edit #2:

To put that $68 Billion deficit into perspective, $68 Billion is larger than the annual budget of 41 individual states.

Did that bill not pass, or was it struck down? I remember that, thinking what right does California have to tax residents of other states? I expect nothing less from Gavin Newsome et al. We have the same problems here in Illinois, aka "California's retarded little brother".

The "Hotel California" proposal to tax at 0.4% the worldwide wealth of any person who lived in CA for any ten year period, AB 2088, died in committee in November 2020.