OK, sure it's only a penny here and penny there but I'm sure it adds up pretty handily in eBay's favour. Few examples of rounding inconsistancies I've found:
- with Paypal - if you are converting one currency to another, we always lose on the decimal. For example, if you were withdrawing your US funds and it was being converted to CDN funds. Say you were withdrawing $123.45 US at a 1.315 exchange rate. For the example, forget about the withdrawl fee. So the equivalent CDN works out to $162.33675 which gets rounded DOWN instead of up to $162.33. Seems not matter what the end digits are, it always gets rounded down when you are withdrawing. On the flip side, when it goes to calculating the Paypal fee on received funds, it gets rounded up if greater than 0.5. So if you sold something for a total of $13.42 and you had a merchant rate of 2.2% + $0.30, your Paypal fee would be $0.595, which would be rounded to $0.60. Seems the rounding rules change depending on who benefits from it.
Likewise, with eBay fees. Sold something for $34.95. Expected my final value fee to be $1.31 for the first $25 and 0.275% for the remainder ($0.27) for a total of $1.58. But apparently, eBay adds the fractions, as the fee shows up as $1.59. The $1.31 for the first $25 is actually $1.3125 and the remainder is $0.273625. So instead of rounding separately, they're added for at total of $1.586125 or $1.59.