I just sold something for $5 and because ebay currently *requires* you to put in a Paypal account I gave mine. The guy that bought the item paid using Paypal, and after fees, I'm left with $4.53 - that's a 9.4% charge.

Because ebay was doing something bizarre when I listed it, I put the item up as $5 with no postage when I really wanted to do $1 with $4 postage. The listing and final value fee came to a total of 76 cents. So assuming it really does only cost me exactly $4 to post, I'll lose 29 cents from the whole deal.

Paypal's terms and conditions specifically forbid you from having a surcharge for transactions carried out using it. If they don't remove the requirement as a result of the recent ACCC ruling, I recommend that everyone add a note to the item description saying that Paypal won't actually be accepted at all despite it being listed, and that they refuse the payments in the Paypal wossname. Though apparently you're not allowed to do that either and your listing can be pulled! You could just correspond with the buyer and not accept the payment if they agree to pay it another way. Though apparently that's dodgy too. Recommendation - don't sell things on eBay.

PayPal has some uses after all

As a buyer, PayPal+eBay isn't too bad. In fact, most dispute resolutions are weighted in your favour, and you can accrue frequent flyer points linked to your credit card for buying random junk.

I recently bought a template from the template design site, templates.com using PayPal. The amount was credited to my account and I tried to purchase the design, and it got stuck in a 'please wait' phase for several days before reverting to a 'timed out - please contact support' address. I sent four emails over just under two weeks and got no replies at all. The next step was to lodge a PayPal non-receipt of goods dispute. While the terms of this seemed to indicate that you were on your own when it came to digitally delivered goods, it still had an option for that in the submission process. The result? When I woke up in the morning, the download link had been fixed and someone had written to apologise for the delay! There was no explanation of the problem or why nobody bothered to reply to me until their $63 was put on the line, but at least I got the thing I bought, and it was much easier that lodging a dispute with my bank (though in the past that hasn't been terribly difficult either).

Would I buy from templates.com again? Ugh, probably not.

Paypal Is Totally Arse

PayPal has some uses after all