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Hey Jay and Ryanne,
$2.72 sounds like it might be a first class return label. Have you gotten any small items returned recently? Incidentals like return shipping will be included on the monthly invoice along with your store fees.
One more thing to consider when electing to bump up to the next store level. If you choose to do the discounted yearly plan, and then decide to downgrade at a later date, eBay immediately charges you all the money you saved with the discounted plan. So if a seller plans to have a larger volume seasonally rather than all year, it may be best to do the month to month.
Example: My Anchor subscription just renewed in April. If I decided to drop down to the Premium level today, I would immediately be billed $799.87
Are you all really encountering that many scammers? In 15 years of selling with over 31000 transactions, I can’t recall running into more than 1 or 2 scammers.
I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in that total sales number at the bottom of the Seller Level Page. I definitely saw it pause for about 8 months a couple years ago. Mine tells me I’ve sold $1.15M since I started in 2005, however Outright/Godaddy shows the number as $1.32M since I signed up for their service in 2011.
Today, July 6, it’s been 15 years since I listed my first item on eBay. I’d have to look back at my taxes, but I’m pretty sure It was 2 or 3 years before I made any money.
Swiss Cargo makes an affordable balistic nylon rooftop cargo bag that folds up and stores under the floor with my spare tire. It adds an extra 13 Cubic Feet of cargo space in a pinch and has come in handy many times, especially on thrift funded vacations/business trips where I already have personal cargo or extra passengers….or when I buy $18K worth of neckties and pay no attention to the size of the pile until I load up.
I think I picked mine up at Ollies for about $25-$30.
Yeah, it was pretty painful, and I’m still feeling the effects. Fortunately, at this point 100% of the packages that had already been shipped but were then refunded, have re-paid for their purchases….thank goodness most people are relatively honest. About 75% of the unshipped/cancelled merchandise has been re-sold as well.
I use separate usernames and passwords on my ebay/paypal/email/bank accounts, and have for years…since the time my paypal was hacked for $1500 maybe 13 years ago. Though I probably haven’t been as diligent in changing them quarterly as I used to be. The only suggestion ebay’s trust/securities department could offer was that perhaps it was some sort of spyware sent to my email….though I’m concerned as to why Norton didn’t catch it. Other than that…I have no idea.
I have the 2-Step verification set up now, which is quite annoying to be honest, but if it keeps this from happening again, I guess I will just get used to it. That way if someone is trying to log into my account in the future, I will know immediately via text.
Not the greatest week here. Wednesday morning, about 8AM, I noticed a bunch of items in my ebay “recently viewed items, from adult only categories” that I had not recently viewed. I called ebay to make sure my account was secure. Talked to 3 reps who told me it was secure, but that there was a suspicious IP address on record from a few days earlier. So they blocked it and told me a few things to do and check on my own, change passwords, password questions, activate 2-Step Verification, etc.
While I was going through the checklist, I discovered that a few days earlier my business policy for Payments had been changed and all my sales for the past 3 days had been paid to someone else’s paypal account. 2 days worth had already been shipped, and the 3rd batch was already packed with shipping labels purchased, but not given to the USPS yet.
Another 3 Rep phone call. They instructed me to put my store on full vacation mode while I make the necessary changes to my account to correct the payment details.
I got to work. I refunded all the transactions with payments to the wrong account, and sent emails to all the affected customers explaining the situation and that I would send a link to their newly listed item or an invoice to make a repeat payment once things were cleaned up. I was able to change the address on most of my active listings using the business policies tool, but I had maybe 500 listings that had offers out. Those all had to be ended, edited and relisted.
Shew, there goes that hour, but not too bad I guess. Hopefully some of those people will re-pay for their stuff.
And then… I discovered the changes had already populated across the other 9 international ebay sites. Waiting for them to switch back on their own via third party update could take up to 48 hours, so I decided to change them all manually on each individual site.
I turned off vacation mode and sent links or invoices to all the affected customers for their items.
Shew, there goes that 6 hours….but that’s still a lot better than two days, right!
I Checked my phone after a couple beers and realized only 10 listings were active in search results on the US site, Then I remembered it taking a while for things to go live again after being on full vacation mode, sometimes a couple days…which is why I stopped using it. I noticed the 10 active listings were listings that I had just edited. I opened a test batch in the bulk editor and just closed it. The test batch showed up in search results a couple minutes later. Nice! I went through all 5000 listings 1000 at a time, opening in bulk editor and closing. A few errors would pop up each time that needed fixing for some reason, so it took about an hour to work through the whole inventory. Finally! Everything was live again!
Wait, what about the international sites? NO!
Rinse, Repeat……
3:30AM Pillow
Thursday Afternoon. I got an email from eBay saying they have noticed suspicious activity on the account and have locked it for all buying, selling, and messaging. I called in to make sure it wasn’t a new account breach, and was told it was just the computer finally catching up with me. He said he could see the history of all the account tasks I had done on Wednesday and was amazed. He told me since the computer had sent the notice out I would just need to change my password again and I would be all set.
Friday Morning. I got another email from eBay saying they noticed suspicious activity on the account and have ended all my listings, and that it was blocked from all buying selling and messaging. Another call to eBay, they said it was still the computer catching up with Monday’s hijacking. I was able to relist everything with credits.
Saturday Morning….
Well, here I am, sitting here with my fingers crossed. I didn’t get much else done this week, didn’t sell much either with the store turned on and off so many times. On the bright side, 75% of the items that had already been shipped have been paid for again by the customers, and 50% off the pending orders that were cancelled have been re-purchased. I’ll get the money back on the postage in a few weeks, and since I cancelled all the orders there will be no fees. All in all, I lost about a day and a half worth of sales, about 3 days worth of listing time and about 100% of my motivation….but it could have been a lot worse.
Finished the week with a $1600 sales day, so that helps take away the sting a bit.
TLDR: My ebay account got hijacked. By changing your ebay, paypal and email passwords regularly and by using security tools such as 2-step verification, you can minimize the risk of it happening to you too. Stay alert!
Hello Trash Elves
Sorry I haven’t been around much this year. Things have been really hectic since my wife started grad school in January, but please know that I have still been listening to the weekly podcasts as always.
I don’t have my numbers to report today, though I can say sales have been roughly 35% of what they normally are. Ooof. I suppose I grossly overestimated the need for neckties in the apocalypse….though they do make great toilet paper in a pinch.
I finally brought on someone to help me a couple days a week with photos, and it has been absolutely amazing! Well…was amazing until the ‘stay at home’ order. I can’t wait until this all blows over so I can get him back over here.
Before the university closed, I was keeping with my plan to thrift all day on Mondays down in the city. While Monday is pretty much the worst day to thrift, it was still soooo much better than the rural thrifting locally. I was able to focus on being very selective in my purchases and also get everything I found listed each week. It did take several weeks to get to the point where I could drive and source all day without getting a headache from my back issues. I don’t know how I used to do my 16-18 hour sourcing days every week. As my wife’s 99 year old grandfather always says “Don’t get old”…..wish I had listened.
I too, got the garden in early this year. I covered half of my raised beds and one of my hoop houses with plastic and seeded a cool weather crop of Broccoli, Kohlrabi, Cabbage, Kale, Spinach, Beets, Carrots and an assortment of 20 or so loose leaf lettuces. The rest will go in around Mother’s Day as usual.
OMG guys! I have a friend coming by to check into helping me out part time. He’ll be here any minute for “disorientation”. Hope my crazy doesn’t scare him off. I’m super excited!
The 2019 Paypal 1099Ks have started to roll out for those of us who meet the minimum threshold. Here is some info I have gathered from ebay and paypal reps concerning the 1099k and internet sale tax.
Problem. The 1099K gross total does indeed include the sales tax that ebay has been processing through Paypal for the past 2-3 months since they changed their collection method. However, the sales tax amount is not clearly broken out on the 1099K, and you will need to do it yourselves. Since eBay changed their sales tax collection method near the end of the year, running a ebay sales report will not give you an accurate total for the sales tax that was processed through paypal. Additionally the ebay report only goes back 90 days, so it will not be that useful in the future, unless you run the report at less than 90 day intervals.
Solution. You can download a CSV format report on your paypal activity page for the entire 2019 year. It may take a couple hours for the report to generate. Once it becomes available, open the CSV file in Excel/Numbers. You will see a Sales Tax column which will show you the sales tax collected by ebay though paypal payments (mainly only in November and December). *Note, depending on the specific report criteria you selected to download, you may see duplicate sales tax values for each transaction. If so, you will need to filter the “type” column to include only “Tax Collected by Partner”. This will eliminate all the duplicates. Next you can (SUM) the sales tax column to get your sales tax total which should be deducted on your 2019 taxes, since it is not income.
When the managed payments changeover happens at some point this year, this will all change. So it may be a good idea to set up automatic downloads of the monthly ebay sales reports, if you aren’t already using them, using ebay’s file exchange. Once your payments are being processed though ebay that may be the only way to reconcile for 2020.
Hope that helps.
Hmm, Perhaps its only for sellers who offer free returns….I don’t recall if you do or not. Or maybe it the new report hasn’t been fully implemented across all sellers yet.
eBay leaves the “refund original shipping” option open specifically for occurrence of false INADs.
Example: if the buyer claims it’s defective because it didn’t fit them, or say the color doesn’t look the same in person as it did on their screen, those are remorse reasons that should not be INAD claims. If you offer free returns, you have the option to withhold the original shipping, and you are supposed to report the buyer for the faulty claim. The combination of the two actions will protect you from negative feedback, as part of the free returns seller protections.
Then when you get your service metrics report for that period you will see that, while that specific return is on the report, it was not counted against you in the evaluation. While the service metric projection is a good benchmark of your current progress, you can’t really rely in the accuracy of it. By the time it becomes the current report, ebay may have adjusted it down in many cases due to the false INADs, and increases in the peer group returns.
