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@porcelainforyou2 wrote:

 

However, I suspect that apart from a blatant "money grab" by eBay, the other reason for introducing the FVF on postage was to counter the few unscrupulous sellers who list an item for 99 cents  (when it is clearly worth much more than that), with a flat rate postage cost of $99, to minimise FVF. Charging FVF on lowest domestic postage may defer a few of those unscrupulous sellers, but one suspects that they would just increase their 'flat rate' postage from $99 to, say $105, to compensate...

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I suspect that's a convenient "excuse" (from eBay, I mean). There would have been a lot of ways eBay could have handled that problem, only one meant they didn't have to actually do anything except collect more money, and unsurprisingly, that's the one they chose.

That reasoning is also undermined by the fact that a low DSR for postage costs won't affect a seller's defect rate. On the US site, they explained that they are no longer letting the low DSR for P&H affect sellers because (and I'm paraphrasing here) buyers don't ultimately care about P&H costs - I know there are some out there that are very finicky about it, but eBay is basically saying they don't care, and buyers still buy even if they sometimes feel gypped on P&H.