UK private seller eBay payments starts to roll out

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eBay June '23 Seller Release - Payment dispute

If you are an UK private seller eBay payments might be coming to you this week or in the near future. Rolling out eBay payments means that eBay manages the end-to-end payments experience on-platform making life easier and the eBay experience more seamless for the everyday eBay seller.

UK private seller eBay payments gives a single sign on for selling and getting paid. When a sale is made, the payment is collected and funds sent directly to the seller’s bank account automatically. Sellers can choose to be paid out daily or weekly and best of all, in cases of disputes, buyers will only get one shot at appealing to eBay and can’t second dip (as in the past by opening a dispute with a third party payment provider).

The big plus point is that eBay payments enables new options for buyers to pay on eBay when purchasing from you which currently include Google Pay and Apple Pay. PayPal is an option as is credit or debit cards for those that don’t want to use mobile payments. A major advantage for buyers is a more streamlined experience at checkout and at last a single sign on to eBay with no need to open a PayPal account before buying.

Most sellers can expect to pay the same or less than before. Although you can expect your eBay fees to rise this is instead of also having 3.4% snaffled by PayPal so overall your fees should fall. Unlike business sellers, it’s a pretty simple comparison to make as just about every private seller will be on the top 3.4% PayPal tier (unless they are businesses masquerading as a private seller in which case everyone will be shouting at you to upgrade to a business account!)

eBay calculate the savings based on annual total sales volumes, and comparisons of prior eBay final value fees plus typical 3rd party payment provider fees, with the new eBay final value fees (without any 3rd party processing fees).

With all payment methods and accounts on the eBay platform, that means sellers now only need to work with one customer service team to settle disputes, streamlining the overall customer experience.

A downside for private sellers is that they’ll no longer have a balance available to spend on eBay (or elsewhere) in PayPal as soon as a sale takes place. Many private sellers liked having savings from selling activity, separate to their normal bank account, knowing it was extra bunce they could splash on purchases without feeling guilty. In some ways this however is more a danger to eBay that private sellers might start buying on other sites but then in truth buyers could already do that in the past with any site that offers PayPal anyway.

A big plus for private sellers will also be that they’ll never be hit with a invoice weeks after a selling splurge on eBay – with most fess snaffled by eBay at the point of sale, any money that ends up in their bank account is theirs to spend with no unexpected bill for fees to follow.

22 Responses

  1. Bit short on detail what about payments in Euros, dollars, etc. Will eBay be playing the same corrupt game that Paypal played where they wouldn’t allow you to gat paid to an account denominated in the foreign currency, so that you were forced to convert to local currency (less Paypal’s outrageously high conversion charges) before it could be withdrawn.

  2. I use my ebay sales and money thus accumulated in paypal to buy items I want from ebay and to pay my postage charges. Without that pot of money being “saved up” in paypal I wont have the money to spend on ebay items so ebay will lose out on both commission on my sales and commission on my purchases. Spoke to ebay about this way back when they first talked about ebay payments and told them I wanted to carry on using paypal but no-one ever got back to me with a solution. Presumably without ebay fees being charged monthly I wont be able to download a monthly invoice listing all sales and their charges which is extremely useful for checking their charges are correct.

  3. Bit rich rolling this out to private sellers. I’m still waiting as a power seller!

    Seems that Ebay doesn’t rate some sellers.

  4. Going by the amount of issues business sellers have had with it, i wish much luck to private sellers. As a business seller we had, and several months on, still are getting, buyers who can’t buy stuff as the paypal button is highlighted but doesn’t work. This seems to be a random occurance and we only discovered it when some customers pointed it out to us, ironically the next day i had this trouble tryinmg to buy from two business sellers. I spoke to them and they said it could account for a sudden dip in sales after starting MP!
    Anyway…. good luck with it ebay. Buyers are less easy to force and punish than sellers.
    oh the sale breakdown each month…. well it is dire. Not sure if private people will be as affected as business sellers, but the whole thing looks like a 13 year olds maths project

  5. Ha – “eBay manages the end-to-end payments experience on-platform making life easier and the eBay experience more seamless for the everyday eBay seller”, well my experience as a business seller hasn’t been seamless!

    eBay is broken, and in my opinion, beyond repair. I have been selling for 15 years on eBay and watched the bizarre rules and dictats appear which have only led to my business being eroded.

    ebay anbd all other platforms need to remember who pays their wages – it’s the seller!

  6. If it’s handled as badly as the managed payments fiasco has been for business sellers then ebay will rupture private sellers in their droves. Remember many of these privates also buy on the platform.

  7. How do I get though to someone!!! My account has been completely taken over! This is my business!! Does anyone have a contact that I can get through to??

  8. It’s not been a fiasco for business sellers. That would mean it was a complete failure. Sure, some people had problems, complained loudly and deservedly, which ebay support just seemed to have shrugged at, but for most, there was no problem.

    The only thing I can really grumble about is that the “Your ebay item sold” email notifications are poor compared with the paypal ones. At the moment, if you get an order for multiple different items, you get an email notification for each one, with the same total figure. If you have multibuy discount set up, that figure won’t even be correct, as it won’t take off the discount. So if you have a 10% multibuy discount sale and it tells you £50 in the email, it will be £45. Why not just have one email that tells you what you sold, and how much actually for, like Paypal did? And if it is an ebay GSP sale, you don’t even get the email notification. What’s that about?

    But other than that, no complaints with it. Sales are up. The money is coming in. Payouts are bang on time.

  9. @Gav, I beg to disagree. It’s been a nightmare for a large number business sellers. Many sole trading partnerships left in limbo, threats from ebay of account suspensions, stuck in a loop providing documentation time and time again that keeps being rejected.
    Many sellers can’t understand the billing process- chat room boards full of complaints about users not being able to work out if they have been paid or not.
    Overall a very unsatisfactory experience for us and one we won’t forget. Our registration is still not sorted out though we have finally been told that our account is now no longer in danger for non compliance.

  10. @ Jonah

    I’m sure it has been a nightmare for a number of business sellers and I remember your posts on the struggle you had, the “computer says no” attitude from ebay MP. I put that down to ebay trying to port over the US version of MP onto the UK version, without considering the differences properly, but I guess it all comes down to the numbers. If it’s just LLPs or sole trader partnerships that had problems, it might seem a big number, but is it even 1% maybe? In which case, annoying, avoidable, incompetent, but no fiasco.

    As for chat room people, they make mountains out of molehills. “How do I know if I’ve been paid?” Really? Ebay are now putting it in bold in seller hub (apparently not in bold font wasn’t cutting it) “Awaiting dispatch means that the buyer’s payment has been confirmed and it’s time to post the order.” If they still have to ask after that…

  11. We were moved over on the 27th of October.

    Our main issue is reconciling the payments against orders.

    All our orders are imported into our accounts programme, with the payments for those orders being directed into a “bank” so for ebay:

    eBay Managed Payments GBP
    eBay Managed Payments USD

    To make sure we have accounted for all the orders, we reconcile against the bank payments received.

    With Paypal, they had a report we could call daily which had the information we needed to do this, Order Number & Order value, there were a couple of bits of other information, but it would fit on one line in the printed report with no “faffing” on our part.

    Now with eBay, we can only get a payout report or a transaction report. The Transaction report contains every bit of possible information about the order in excel and i have to manipulate the data to get the information i need, also, as they look after the payments we get in USD due to listing directly on eBay.com we have work out the exchange rate used for converting it to GBP.

    So we have to do a transfer between the eBay USD & eBay GBP “banks” for the USD and then transfer between eBay UK and our nominated bank account.

    I just need a basic report that i can reconcile against, Order – Date – Order number – Order Value.

    I would also like to be able to put in my own bank for USD as we have US suppliers and i used to send all my Paypal USD to my US Bank, now i get an FX charge from eBay and an FX charge for any monies that i have to move into my US bank from my UK bank.

    Cant see that happening soon as eBay Managed Payments would lose out on FX charges!!!

  12. Does anyone know if eBay fixed their compatibility issues with other eBay sites? E.g. You have a UK registered account, but log in and sell directly on eBay.com or eBay.de for example? Is that now possible, and if so, is it only possible for sites in countries where MP has also rolled out?

  13. I think it’s hilarious that Tamebay believe that Managed Payments is anything to do with making things better for sellers or buyers. Have you seen the Ebay forums recently? Business sellers have been up in arms about this for months, and even buyers are now noticing that something has gone wrong with payments, and they don’t like it. I’m so glad that I got out in time. This – like everything that Ebay does – is all about grabbing as much money for themselves as they can, and nothing else. It’s been downhill on Ebay for years – especially since the “10% fee on postage” scam. I originally joined in about 1999/2000, but I cancelled my account last month and they will NEVER get a penny from me ever again. The Chinese are welcome to them.

  14. @northmanc so you would rather stay with Paypal and let them keep the fees for all returns or have ebay refund you all the fees?
    I have been on Managed Payments for a while now and find it ok. Much prefer not having to give fees to Paypal for returns which in some categories and items I sold soon adds up.
    Hopefully it might sort out a lot of the private sellers who run a business that ebay never seem to bother about.

  15. I also cannot complain about the MP (yes, you’ve read it right). Seems to work as it should so far.

    Yes, the beginnings have been poor with their lack of communication etc. The reports are pretty basic, and I had downloaded the payout csv file and could not make it up the first time. No idea what’s what, if VAT inclusive or exclusive. I have now integrated the payouts into our custom ‘sales tool’ that my accountant uses for the books. Much simpler than PayPal. Win-win.

  16. Agree with Jonah – our partnership still cannot register for managed payments and we are also in limbo.

    Had a vaguely threatening message from Ebay saying they would be telling partnerships what they had to do in order to register for MP.

    What we have to do? Hell, we’ve jumped through more hoops than a dolphin at an ocean park.

    Also, what about micropayments?

    Was told by Ebay CS they were aware of the issue, but why not fix this at the outset, as 30p transaction fee will nix many small transactions on Ebay.and

  17. A question for MP sellers… is there a way for sellers to send a buyer (like me) a digital invoice of what I have just bought?
    A part of the reason for buying online for me is less paperwork, less invoices floating about, less printing, and I can buy things for my (non online) business and get a digital invoice that I can then send to my accountant at the end of the year for my SA.
    Previously I could buy in eBay, pay with Paypal then at the end of the year I can go to PayPal and download all the invoices for that tax year and send to my accountant. I can’t do that now, as Paypal has no idea who I bought from or what item.
    So can MP sellers send digital invoices? and if so, how can I tell them which email address to send to, as eBay doesn’t let me send email addresses through their system.
    If this can’t work, for me this is a big failing of eBay, as I can’t buy through them for my business anymore, as I can’t claim it against tax.
    Welcome to Amazon 😛
    Any thoughts?
    C.

  18. @ Clive

    At the moment, it is possible to use the ebay generated proxy email address to send a PDF to customers who request a copy VAT invoice, but after 2 weeks, this proxy email is removed from the sale records. This can be a problem because many invoice requests tend to come weeks or months later, probably when the buyer is doing their year end or VAT quarter.

    If Ebay sort out their messaging system and allow PDFs to be sent, this wouldn’t be a problem any more. I can’t see any logical reason why they don’t. Or they could set up a system like Amazon Business, offering downloadable VAT invoices on behalf of the seller.

  19. As a MP seller I wish eBay stood up to being a bit modern (it’s 2021 almost….) And offer the buyer a link to download/view the invoice *automatically* (just like Amazon does). Tired of doing it manually for buyers, tired of asking for my purchases.

    The proxy email expiring after 2 weeks is a solution (read joke) only eBay could come up with.

  20. Having approx. 13.5% taken at source is better than being hit with a bigger bill than expected at the end of every month. Of course, this could open up some private sellers to HMRC investigation as banks are encouraged to report “suspicious business activity”. The days of private sellers deliberately making a profit are numbered, I already grassing up as many private sellers as I can as it’s unfair that I put eBay sales on my tax return and so many don’t bother.

  21. Managed payments is a disgraceful theft of payments by ebay. They literally charge more per transaction now, add on Forex fees and allow their agent (adyen?) to sit on the cash, if that’s not ebay using it in the markets themselves for days and days, whereas payments were instant in paypal. I have the daily setting and get paid weekly if I am lucky. The new system is utter rubbish, and they are taking advantage of the Covid situation, as this is an awful time to leave ebay and to switch to bricks and mortar, with Lockdowns possible at short notice any time. Shame on them for making so much money from us and then to start screwing us, their cash cows. If I could leave managed payments I’d be out of there in a minute.

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