eBay Managed Payments is live in the US and Germany for a limited number of merchants and isn’t going to grow much before July this year when their agreement with PayPal enables them to expand rapidly. eBay have already said that they expect to complete the multi-year, phased launch in 2021 so we’re expecting to hear some news about eBay Managed Payments coming to the UK later this year, but there’s one aspect sellers are already dreading and that’s the per listing fee compared to PayPal’s per transaction fee.
“The per listing payments fee will be charged for each listing contained in an order. If an order contains more than one listing sold, the per listing payments fee will be charged more than once. If a single listing contains multiple items, or multiple quantities of the same item, the per listing payments fee will be charged once.”
– eBay Managed Payments
The problem with a per listing fee is that if you routinely sell multiple item orders from multiple listings then you’ll be paying enormous processing fees. In the US, the per listing fee is $0.25 and while that doesn’t sound much, if most of your orders contain items from multiple listings you could be paying significantly more than if it was a single per transaction fee.
Now, Jordan Sweetnam has realised the problem. Jordan recently returned to eBay as Senior Vice President and General Manager, Americas Market and responding to a question asked on the eBay Discussion Boards revealed that he wasn’t previously aware of the difference between per listing fee compared to per transaction fees.
“It was actually news to me recently about the difference in the “per item” vs “per transaction” fee. If you are selling 40 different postcards to one customer in the same transaction I agree it would seem odd for us to charge the per item on each one. I don’t have the full history here, but will dig into it.
A lot will change and become clear as we get further into next year so please keep providing the feedback.”
– Jordan Sweetnam, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Americas Market, eBay
eBay will be learning more lessons, both in the US and in Germany where eBay Managed Payments are still effectively pilot projects with cherry picked eBay sellers who will save money being the first to participate. By the time eBay Managed Payments come to the UK, a lot of issues will have been ironed out and we’re hopeful that the per listing fee will be changed to a per transaction fee before they become mandatory.
11 Responses
Glad to see Mr Sweetnam has heard the “news” about the per item transaction fees. It’s only been out there for a year and why would a board member know about such things ??? Which is basically the problem with Ebay, isn’t it. The board who makes such decisions is unaware of the fallout for sellers and buyers on their site!
I will make a deal with Mr Sweetnam, if you row back on these nonsensical per item transaction fees, I might decide not to close my Ebay account, which I was due to do once I was forced to accepted managed payments.
Deal?
Were fairly encouraged by Mr Sweetnams
Honesty and approach
Hes listened and took note ,cant expect anyone person to know everything .
Taking action on an issue when they do ,is all you can hope for
its a time honoured ebay method
put it out there and let the sellers find the flaws
fixing the flaws that are found are not ebays best skill
as long sellers cope with and work round the faults, ebay do nothing
put another way unless its perceived to harm ebays revenue, its not dealt with
It is nice they will take care of it “eventually”,, but why didn’t they take care of it
when it first came up..= made more money in their pockets as planned. ??
I’ve been in Managed Payments since May 2019, so I have to pay that 10¢ transaction fee on all items sold. I raised my prices on Fixed Price listings a dollar. And have added a handling fee to my postage charges for Auctions. Problem solved.
The cost has to get passed to the customers. If sales drop because customers leave eBay, THEN eBay might do something about it. Might.
The concept of fee per listing sounds like eBay’s another way to make more money. Or “make up” enough if the sales are down. It’s sinking ship and they even know it!
Everybody in our section has increased there prices to cover the extra promotional costs. In our case now is our website is cheaper that EBay so we now pop in a promotional slip saying so and advertise our website. Our website has seen exceptional growth over the last six months and I cannot see it slowing down, so we are being paid to advertise which is a lot cheaper that Google or Facebook.
Problem with EBay is they are trying to achieve a certain amount of profit and they are not achieving it so increase prices and try and get there and still don’t achieve it and so the problem grows until they don’t have a business.
What they should be doing for the long term is reducing there prices to attract more buyers that will sell cheaply and so grow, but the profit will be reduced but makes it better long term. So the moral of the above, shortsightedness.