Be Excellent To Each Other

Sold my guitar on eBay a few weeks ago. It cost me around £25 to list the fucker, which was fair enough. I knew exactly how much it was costing me. I wanted a reserve and a BIN price etc. I was happy with that. Got my "bill" for my fees the other day and they want £60-odd. So not only do they charge you to list the thing in the first place, but they take a cut of the sale price as well. Having never sold anything as valuable as my guitar before, I hadn't realised this.

Even better was the fact that they said "we'll be taking this automatically in the next week or so, probably". So they spring a £60-odd bill on me one morning and can't even tell me exactly when they're going to take it off me. FYI, I'm skint as fuck. That's why I sold my guitar. I wasn't expecting a bill nearly £40 more than I was already aware of. I can't justify paying them £60-odd right now. Naturally I removed my "auto payment" jazz from eBay and I've even removed my debit card from my PayPal account for good measure. They can't touch me now.

However, my question is: What happens next? I know after a week or two they remove your access to your eBay account until you've paid your fees because that has happened to me before (for a fee of about £2 that I totally forgot about). But what do they do after that? Can I feasibly get away with not paying this for a long time? I have no plans to use eBay for a while. I will pay the fees eventually, but being skint and with Christmas on the way, I really can't afford it this month or probably next.

I've had fees owing for about 6 months now and I use ebay every couple of week to buy stuff still.

Heh! Not something to worry about, then? They definitely suspended my account a couple of years ago when I forgot to pay some fees, so maybe they do it on a case-by-case basis?

They will stop you listing other items on Ebay , and will (if you have paypal linked to an account) claw the money back from there and start chasing you for it - however you probably have quite a while.

I know someone they messed around with a while ago and he simply opened another ebay account and used that for ages until they caught up with him , linked the old account and asked for the missing money - he grumbled but paid up and that was a good year or so.

I really wish there was a good alternative to ebay to sell tat as when you list something they charge you for :

Initial listing fees (varies but if you start with a reasonable start or reserve can be quite a bit)
Final value fees which is basically 10% of the total it sold for
Then Paypal fee's of 3% of the total *plus* postage

So sell a £100 item with say £10 postage then they charge

£1.30 to list
£10 final value fees
£3.30 Paypal fees

so you walk away with £85.40 and the hassles of dealing with someone who will want it shipped to outer mongolia , will have been emailing you every 5 minutes since the auction ended to check if its sold , then will say its not compatible with what they wanted and return it for a full refund (or simply not get in touch - in which case Ebay will still charge you the £15 and you get it back 'later')

Still, you do owe then the money.
It's not like they're not up front about it.

They're not up front about it, though. I had a buy it now on my item. That gives it a theoretical maximum sale price. Why can't they tell me how much I'll have to pay should that occur? As opposed to making it look as though the fairly hefty listing fees are the limit oft obligation to them. There's no clear indication that they're going to take money off the sale price as well as the listing fees. I certainly didn't realise.

Besides, I'm not disputing that I owe them money, I'm just asking what will happen if I don't pay it for a few months because I can't afford to.

When I last did a buy it now sale*, they told me how much it would cost in big letters.

That was six months or so ago, mind.

*my signed Alien script**

**£299

Really? As in, the sale fees they'd take for selling at the BIN price or the cost to actually add a BIN price? When I sold my guitar, I got the listing fees totalled up just fine (about £20-odd as I say, including their abitrary charge for adding a BIN price), but there was absolutely no indication as to what their sale fees would be or even that they existed as far as I could tell. So getting a bill for over £60 weeks after I'd spent most of the money was a bit of a shock...

Reserves are ridiculously overpriced. A lot more economical to just start the item at the price you want to sell it for.

Also when compared to traditional auction houses that often have considerably less potential bidders, I find the Ebay+Paypal charges to be quite reasonable. The reason you were not quoted a price when listing is that you held a traditional auction but had a buy it now. The traditional auction could have become active and the final selling price could have been different to the buy it now price. If you just have a buy it now price then you get a quote due to the final price being set in stone.

My Mum owed them fees for about six months as she had no Paypal linked to her account, they just kept sending her reminders, so I wouldn't worry to much about it.