topic Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more . in Selling

Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

lojomojo7 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 11:47:31 GMT

I have been noticing for a while now, on all of my invoices across all accounts.

The fees don't add up right. They are always 1 cent or 2 cents dearer than they should be.

That might not seem like much, but if that is happening to every seller and every invoice - that could add up to a consideral sum,

which they are not entitled to.

what do we do?

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

purplemon18 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 11:55:17 GMT

Almost certainly they are roounding errors since they charge a percentage.

Like if they charged me 10.4 cents it would be displayed as $0.10, but with 2 such charges it would be 20.8 cents or $0.21

You could point this out to the ACCC, but they would probably not be interested. Winning a case like that against ebay's lawyers would be tough.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

lojomojo7 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 12:03:53 GMT

There are millions and millions of sellers. When I googled it, the figure for 2015 was 25 million. It's probably more now.

If all the increases are between 1 cent and 2 cents then they are earning between $250,000 and $500,000 per month that they don't deserve. That adds up to a whopping $3,000,000 to $6,000,000 per year.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

digital*ghost — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 12:09:33 GMT

Do you ever have people paying one lot of postage for multiple items? If you do, that can explain it.

eBay - for some unknown reason - divide the postage charge by the number of items in the order, then calculate the FVF on that fraction of the postage cost, then add them back up together to get the FVF on postage.

For example, lets say your postage is $5 - someone buys one item with $5 P&H, eBay calculates 10.9% of $5, and charges you 55c (rounded up from 54.5c).

Now lets say someone buys 30 items and you still only charge $5 in postage. eBay divides $5 by 30, which is 16.6 cents recurring, so they round it up to 17c. Then they charge 10.9% on 17c, 30 individual times - 10.9% of 17c is 1.85c which gets rounded up to 2c, 2c x 30 is 60c, and boom, eBay just made a cool 5c for no reason.

This happens to me multiple times a week, but the amount is too small for me to feel inclined to talk to someone at eBay about it.

Although, another site I sell on recently had to refund a lot of money to sellers because while you could list there in any currency, they would convert all amounts to USD, calculate their FVF on the converted amount, and then convert the fee back into the seller's currency, resulting in a lot of 1, 2 or 3c discrepancies. When they refunded me, the amount was around $75 from maybe a year's worth of transactions.

I wonder what eBay's tally would be if they had to do the same.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

kopenhagen5 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 12:11:39 GMT

Some round up and some round down. (You are not considering the decreases which you don't see)

The rule is .5 and up, rounded up. Anything under, rounded down.

It wouldn't surprise me if the rounding is close to even makng it eBay's legitimate funds.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

lojomojo7 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 12:15:01 GMT

There is no rounding. I have just checked right back to Feb 2018 and it's the same.

Just go to your invoices, get out a calculator and add up the fees.

They are always out by 1c or 2c.

That extra money is just theft.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

lojomojo7 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 12:20:49 GMT

I only add the fees on the actual monthly invoice. The bottom figure for the fees is always wrong. Always out by 1 or 2 cents.

They know that only taking an extra 1 or 2 cents probably won't have many people complaining or even noticing.

But then multiply it by the number of sellers and you get Millions of dollars stolen from sellers.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

digital*ghost — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 12:24:09 GMT

I can't explain that one.

Sometimes when I make a one-off payment, paying exactly what they say I owe at the time of the payment, and check my account balance afterwards there's a -1c or +1c balance. I have no idea what causes it, though - possibly some software issue since they're dealing with fractions and percentages. It could be an Office Space kind of thing - some disgruntled office worker somewhere has worked in a bug to skim micro amounts from transactions. (I jest, but you never know... ).

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

collect247 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 12:39:16 GMT

Perhaps ebay are skimming 1c-2c here and there to recoup for all the free listings they give away? and hope that no one as clever as you notice what is happening.

Kudos to you my friend.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

khulu74 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 14:05:17 GMT

😂😂😂 a store holder was telling us here last week, “all store holders were paying the non-store holders eBay promo offers (as poor eBay was loosing money during this $1 and free fvf promo period) ..🤣🤣🤣

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

digital*ghost — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 14:47:19 GMT

That's kinda how business works, lol.

Like, every time you go to Coles, or Target, or some other store, the price you pay for what you buy includes a percentage of all of the business' costs so that after all of them have been paid, they still make a profit.

That means if they run a "buy one get one free" promo, 100 people buying a chocolate bar, or a rotisserie chicken, are paying for someone else to get that free item (obviously they're also contributing to this cost themselves through other purchases they make, but the people spending the most money are picking up the slack for all the people that go in and buy 100 items on special at below cost). It also means people are paying for the losses a business incurs when someone else steal something. So yeah, when you buy a pair of jeans, you're paying the business $$ so they don't actually lose anything when someone else stole a pair for themselves and so paid nothing for them.

ebay is no different. (And no, I'm not comparing taking advantage of free listings to stealing, it just helps clarify my point by utilising that example).

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

khulu74 — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 16:32:19 GMT

with 1or2¢ “mistakes” / “glitch” on invoicese, eBay makes millions from its users..but the store holders are still paying my non-store account offers, it is a bit store-holder exaggeration 🤣🤣

🤣🤣 oh by the way, many eBay store holders have received these eBay’s free fvf offers & $1 promo weekend offer via their non-store accounts and they used them (so, technically, ebay store holders paid their non-store offers themselves 🤷🏼‍♂️)

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

digital*ghost — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 00:32:03 GMT

We have one person saying their invoices are out 1-2c a month, and then theorising about how much money eBay could potentially be making from that if it is happening to all active sellers.

Interesting that you'd accept an unsubstantiated theory so readily - is it because it suits your positiion better?

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

brerrabbit585 — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 02:44:13 GMT

@lojomojo7 wrote:
I only add the fees on the actual monthly invoice. The bottom figure for the fees is always wrong. Always out by 1 or 2 cents.
They know that only taking an extra 1 or 2 cents probably won't have many people complaining or even noticing.
But then multiply it by the number of sellers and you get Millions of dollars stolen from sellers.

Maybe they're adding up the actual fees (eg. 71.2c) but only showing 71c on the invoice. Perhaps you could go to the ACCC about it - it'd be a good use of your time to spend a few hours to get a few cents back. If ebay find they miss the extra fees they "may" be currently skimming they'll just increase the fees and get them one way or the other.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

jiggity-jig — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 09:04:44 GMT

If you download your invoice in CSV format this notation appears near the top.

Note: The line item total may not match the invoice total because of rounding the Final Value Fees. This is for display purposes only. The exact amount is used to calculate the total balance. To correct this, we have included a Rounding Adjustment amount. See http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/account/rounding-account-balance.html for more information.

And the final entry on the page is a rounding adjustment which can be zero but is usually plus or minus one to two cents.

I did try the link but it tkes me to a Viewing your account page with no specific information about rounding.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

digital*ghost — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 12:16:29 GMT

@brerrabbit585 wrote:

Maybe they're adding up the actual fees (eg. 71.2c) but only showing 71c on the invoice. Perhaps you could go to the ACCC about it - it'd be a good use of your time to spend a few hours to get a few cents back.

I'd rather see them taken to task over the way they calculate FVF on postage - because of the method outlined above, I have at times paid nearly 20% FVF on the postage component.

Too lazy to do anything about it myself, but.

Re: Has anyone else noticed that your invoices are adding up wrong - ebay are taking 1c or 2c more .

brerrabbit585 — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 22:21:18 GMT

I was thinking since I changed to capped postage that they only did one fee on shipping per transaction but you're right, it's still done the other way. If they buy 3 items it works out at 10.8% instead of 9.5%. I think I can live with it - I make it up other ways when people buy more than one.