Ebay is going to start charging a Final Value Fee on Sales Tax Collections
 

Haven't seen this mentioned yet on this site, but is all over the Ebay boards. As Ebay is starting to force everybody off of Paypal and into their own Payment Management system, they are going to start doing something I thought was even too low for Ebay..........but I was wrong apparently.

The fee tightening continues.

First they started charging a final value fee on S&H charges, claiming to rein in the few sellers who were gaming the system, by punishing everybody, instead of policing the few.

Then they volunteered to start collecting Sales Tax on behalf of sellers/buyers, driving up the cost of a transaction. I understand, they were being proactive, I don't put this one completely on them. It was basically our Supreme Court who opened up for the states to start making selling entities responsible for state to state tax collection, rather then the individual buyers. I get it. Makes things much simpler for collection.

Well, Ebay started just collecting and remitting the sales tax, leaving us mostly out of the mix. Great, less paperwork for me. Wasn't long before they realized they could pawn the processing fee off on us by funneling it through Paypal first, and then collecting the tax, leaving us with an additional loss on every sales tax transaction............Oh, and by the way, if you have to give a refund for any reason, Paypal will not refund their fees on any part of that transaction, including the sales tax, which goes right back into their pocket, and in the process, doesn't cost Ebay a thing.

Fast forward to the last update. Ebay wants to ditch Paypal badly, so they can start collecting the processing fees themselves. Slowly they are forcing all sellers into this program. As soon as this happens, Ebay has announced they will be combining their processing fee with their final value fee (for simplicity sake, LOL), and applying it to the entire transaction (Final cost of item + S&H charges + Sales Tax).

So processing fee, I understand. Nearly all merchants who deal with credit cards have to absorb the sales tax portion as a loss. Sucks, but it is what it is.

Now it seems Ebay didn't really fight this collection process, because they've figured out how to get an additional 8%-10% out of the sales tax revenue as part of their final value fee.

I can't imagine this is legal in any way shape or form, or maybe everything's been deregulated to the point that Payment Processor's can pretty much do whatever they want now, but this seems silly/greedy beyond belief to me.