You may have never noticed, but eBay does charge a buyer a fee for most items. The rate of this fee is 10% of the postage you pay to the seller.

You might not notice it because they don’t advertise the fact, they sneakily include it with the sellers costs, but it is the buyer who pays the fee as it’s taken at the time of your order. You also might not know about it because many sellers absorb this fee, but you are still paying it because it’s either include in the buy now price or in the starting price.

I used to sell a lot of stuff on eBay and some of the items were low value but heavy. For example, A Book – Say you put a book on auction, and it sold for the starting bid of 99p. Before you listed the book, you weighed it and found the postage cost was going to be £3.50. So great, you’ve sold your book, and you’ve sent it out to the buyer, and they’ve left you great feedback. Everything fine.. Till you check your statement on eBay and here how that works out for you;

Your Book – Value to you? Let’s say nothing.
Postage cost £2.99 – We’ll ignore the misc cost of your time, paper, packing & printing etc, but these could work out are 50p easy if you bought a postal box.
eBay Fees = 0.81

So the cost to you before bank charge is now £3.80

Your buyer pays £3.89 pence.

Because you’ve had to fund back 30p towards your buyer’s postage you only gain 9p on the deal and in reality you’ve lost money and the more of these deals you do the more you lose, so what do sellers do? Well, they increase the price of the item to accommodate this, and that means the buyers pay. But eBay wins twice because at £2.99 postage they were to make 30p but if you increase the postage to £3.29 they make 33p 🙂

It’s a con and should be stopped or made clear to buyers that they are being charged.