eBay

aramatic · ‎07-22-2021

I'm looking at an item whose Buy It Now price is US$99.99. The shipping to Canada through the GSP is $26.98 (=$126.97), though if I click Buy It Now the shipping mysteriously increases to $27.17 (=$127.16). No big deal. Checking my messages, however, I see that the seller has offered a 15% discount, so the item is now $85. The shipping slips down to $23.66, but out of nowhere comes an estimated import charge of $17.45 (=$126.11). Why a charge is only estimated on a fixed total is beyond me. It's not as if the price will change. But the net result is that the seller's offer makes absolutely no difference. Shipping rises from $26.98 to $41.11. I've seen this time and again. eBay and its wretched GSP just pluck figures out of the air that are not to the advantage of either buyer or seller. The so-called "import charge" (I've never paid duty on a thing in 17 years of eBaying) bears no relation to reality and is apparently just a good moneyspinner for Pitney-Bowes. It's a pity that so many US sellers are unaware of this and of the fact that sending directly using USPS is both cheaper and quicker.

marnotom! · ‎07-22-2021

If this item is being forwarded through the GSP
and you’re viewing the listing on the .ca site, there should be a field for import charges right on the listing page. If you’re viewing the listing on the .com site, my experience has been that the import charges don’t show up until checkout.

On what eBay site are you viewing the listing? What are the import charges as stated on the listing page?

aramatic · ‎07-23-2021

It's the same on both eBay.ca and eBay.com, the only difference being that eBay.ca shows approximate conversions into Canadian dollars. No import charges appear on the eBay.com listing. The shipping is US$27.17. On eBay.ca the shipping is $27.17 + $9.47 import charge = $36.64. If I click Review Offer (the 15% discount from $99.99 to $85) the shipping changes to $23.66 + 17.45 = $41.11! As I said, numbers are apparently plucked at random, to no one's benefit but eBay's and Pitney-Bowes's. Apart from the "import charge" that makes its way into a corporate pocket (unless there's evidence that this money is sent to the Canadian government), eBay gets its cut from charging a final value fee on an inflated shipping cost.

reallynicestamps · ‎07-23-2021

The Global Shipping Program is a Seller Protection program that offers very little for the buyer, nor is it meant to.

The $27.17 is what it costs** the seller to ship to the GSP plant in Erlanger KY.

The further charges cover duty (none since our new duty-free allowance for the USA is $150Cdn/~$120US) Canadian sales taxes on value over the tax-free allowance of $40 (for BC that would be ~~$100US~~ $120 Cdn x 13%= $15.60Cdn). and ~$5 as the GSP service charge*.

EBay charges the seller ~10% of the buyer's entire payment, including shipping and sales taxes.

Since the seller doesn't really know what her buyer will be paying (she probably doesn't care either, she wants that Seller Protection against the nasty and probably criminal foreigners) it is best for you to view the the costs on dotCA. You are not only dealing with two different currencies, but also variable exchange rates.

Hmm. There is also the question of the sales tax. Which province? HST or GSP+PST? or PST only?

The basic idea is yes, eBay is going to make a profit. That's why they are in business.

The seller is also going to make a profit. And the GSP (which is run by PitneyBowes for eBay) is going to make a profit. And all the shippers involved except possibly the USPS. Canada Post will make a profit too if they are the last mile carrier.

There may be duty. There will be sales tax.

If you bought it at Canadian Tire, all those profits would be built in and invisible.

*Canada Post charges $9.95 for the same service. UPS between $10 -$25.

**https://postcalc.usps.com/?country=10440

marnotom! · ‎07-23-2021

@aramatic wrote:

It's the same on both eBay.ca and eBay.com, the only difference being that eBay.ca shows approximate conversions into Canadian dollars. No import charges appear on the eBay.com listing.

And there's the difference. Import charges don't appear on the listing page on the .com site if you make a purchase of a GSP-forwarded item on the .com site. I'm assuming that's why they "appeared out of nowhere" for you because they would have been on the listing page if viewed on the .ca site.

@aramatic wrote:

The shipping is US$27.17. On eBay.ca the shipping is $27.17 + $9.47 import charge = $36.64. If I click Review Offer (the 15% discount from $99.99 to $85) the shipping changes to $23.66 + 17.45 = $41.11! As I said, numbers are apparently plucked at random, to no one's benefit but eBay's and Pitney-Bowes's. Apart from the "import charge" that makes its way into a corporate pocket (unless there's evidence that this money is sent to the Canadian government), eBay gets its cut from charging a final value fee on an inflated shipping cost.

I'm thinking this may be a quirk similar to the one that was discovered with the use of "Best Offer" on a GSP-forwarded item. If you're feeling brave enough to see this through to Checkout, I'm betting you're going to see those "estimated" charges adjusted at Checkout once the GSP bot knows for sure what province the item is being shipped to. See this old thread for more of a sense of what I'm babbling on about:

https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Buyer-Central/Inconsistent-Import-Charges-with-GSP/m-p/420150

@aramatic wrote:

As I said, numbers are apparently plucked at random, to no one's benefit but eBay's and Pitney-Bowes's. Apart from the "import charge" that makes its way into a corporate pocket (unless there's evidence that this money is sent to the Canadian government), eBay gets its cut from charging a final value fee on an inflated shipping cost.

I think it's more likely that the GSP's charges are based on a "worst case scenario" before being finalized at Checkout.

A phew phun phacts about the GSP. The GSP actually pays the taxes, duty and clearance fees owing on the item on your behalf. The "import charges" are the mechanism for paying those charges back. Seeing as the GSP has been around for about eight years, I'm sure the feds would have cottoned on by now if there was something nefarious going on.

Also, the shipping charge probably seems "inflated" to you because the GSP is a forwarding service, so you're paying the seller's charge for shipping the item domestically (i.e. to the Global Shipping Center in Kentucky) plus the GSP's shipping charge. Those GSP shipping charges can actually be quite reasonable if the seller lists the item properly, i.e. in the correct category and with information the GSP can work with on the item's shipping size and weight, as well as its country of origin. I've paid less than $15 to have cell phones shipped to me because the sellers offered "free" shipping within the US and the weight of a packaged cell phone is fairly standard. This is much less than what premium shipping services would charge, and I might end up having to pay taxes and clearance fees on top of that when I receive the item, to boot.

Last phun phact: eBay does not charge FVF on international shipping charges. FVF on shipping charges are based on the seller's domestic shipping charge. Even if this weren't the case, for GSP items the seller is only charging the buyer their domestic shipping charge; it's the GSP that charges for getting the item to its international destination, so there's no way FVF can be charged on a shipping charge the seller didn't make.

I'm not trying to defend the GSP, only explain a bit more about how it works. One can still hate the GSP and understand its workings. I haven't purchased much more than cell phones through the GSP because it doesn't make a lot of sense to use the service for most of the sorts of things I purchase on eBay, but I've found how to make it work to my advantage for a particular type of item, at least.

aramatic · ‎07-23-2021

"The seller is also going to make a profit". Not really. When the $15 discount by the seller is obliterated by a $17.45 import charge I don't buy. A discount resulting in a higher overall cost is nonsense. And no one explains where these figures come from. They just appear magically. As for your Canadian Tire analogy, everything of course has hidden costs, which are entirely different. I don't pick up something at Canadian Tire and find the price suddenly increases because I've decided to use the self-serve checkout.

aramatic · ‎07-23-2021

All I can say is that sending items directly using USPS instead of GPS is cheaper and quicker. None of the nonsense of sending things to hang around in Kentucky for a while until they're repackaged and sent on. I live across the border from Washington State and have received the same items less expensively and more quickly from Egypt and Peru than from Seattle. I've never paid so-called "import charges" in 17 years of eBaying except through GPS. I don't think many American sellers realise how GPS inflates a shipping charge. They will if and when eBay Canada offers the same "service".

marnotom! · ‎07-23-2021

If you go through Checkout for this item, I'm betting that the import charges are going to be reduced. What you're seeing as part of the offer are likely import charges based on 15% HST in some provinces. The $9.47 in import charges you saw on the listing pages is more in line with fact that the GSP only calculates GST and a processing charge on items, so in this case five bucks (5% of $99.99) plus a reasonable $4.47 processing charge.

Read the "best offer" thread I linked to earlier if you haven't already done so. The quirk you've run into sounds remarkably like the one with GSP and "best offer".

By the way, if you haven't paid import charges in 17 years of eBaying, you've either been incredibly lucky or you've been purchasing extremely low value items. When my wife and I first started eBaying in the late 1990s, a lot of our items sent by mail were hit by tax and duty charges by CBSA. CBSA even disagreed with the declared value on one item, made up its own value supposedly based on market conditions, and charged us tax and duty based on that reassessed value. I'd say that around the time you started on eBay, CBSA started letting a lot more stuff slide without getting assessed for taxes and duty owing.

femmefan1946 · ‎07-23-2021

to hang around in Kentucky for a while until they're repackaged and sent on.

While GSP does repackage some items, most just keep moving.

Stop to think how much it would cost in labour and in packing materials to repackage all of the thousands of shipments GSP handles daily for eBay's international customers.

And there are enough shipments that GSP seems to have opened a second plant in nearby Ohio.

Repacked items have a notice included (I received one) and the repacking is usually because the seller did not include sufficient information for the customs declaration.

I live across the border from Washington State and have received the same items less expensively and more quickly from Egypt and Peru than from Seattle.

Both Egypt and Peru are much cheaper places to live. Lower wages and lower postal charges than the USA.

And those postal systems are using Air Mail for foreign shipping, not trucks.

I've never paid so-called "import charges" in 17 years of eBaying except through GPS. I don't think many American sellers realise how GPS inflates a shipping charge.

Until July 2020 we were supposed to pay duty and sales taxes on any import over $20Cdn (~$15US) plus sales tax.

CBSA and Canada Post officials slightly illegally decided it would cost the taxpayer too much to assess and collect fees when the value of the shipment was under ~$100. They have reported that 93.3% of shipments under that value were passed through without examination.

Since most private imports are shipped by post, many Canadians did not know there were any import fees due.

But couriers like UPS and GSP* HAD to collect those.

Since 2020 the duty-free allowance for the USA has risen to $150 and the tax free allowance to $40.

No inflation. Just the money you were legally bound to pay.

*GSP sub-contracted to Canada Post for most last mile deliveries. As do UPS, FedEx etc when delivery will not be profitable, in rural and isolated communities.

aramatic · ‎07-23-2021

How do you explain why it's cheaper and faster to send an item by USPS rather than the GPS? There's nothing underhand about the former. And someone had better tell eBay that the duty-free allowance is $150. GPS sticks import charges on items of far less value.

marnotom! · ‎07-23-2021

@aramatic wrote:

How do you explain why it's cheaper and faster to send an item by USPS rather than the GPS? There's nothing underhand about the former. And someone had better tell eBay that the duty-free allowance is $150. GPS sticks import charges on items of far less value.

The duty-free limit for items from the US and Mexico is C$150, yes, but the tax-free limit is C$40. The interesting thing about the GSP versus most other carriers is that the GSP only calculates the equivalent of GST (and processing charges) when the item is sent to provinces like ours (British Columbia) where the HST isn't a thing. Those people living in provinces with HST are stuck paying HST as part of the import charges.

This is why I said that the item you were looking at appeared to have a GST calculation on the listing page but changed to an HST calculation when the seller sent you the discount information. I still think that if you go through checkout and indicate that you want the item shipped to BC, the GSP bot will go back to a GST-based calculation for the import charges.

It's often less expensive to have items sent directly by USPS to Canada because there's only one shipper involved. Because the GSP is a forwarding service, there's more carriers involved. The wait in Kentucky is for processing and customs pre-clearance.

For what it's worth, I ordered cases for my phones at the same time I ordered the phones I had forwarded through the GSP. In all instances but one the phone arrived before its case. In fairness, I don't think all of those cases were sent directly by USPS, but rather through mail consolidation services which are cheaper than USPS but slower.

aramatic · ‎07-23-2021

Thanks for some clarification, though no one has accounted for my original example of a $99.99 item being reduced to $85 and the shipping increased by $17, which is a wonderful example of giving with one hand and taking with the other, except that the hands belong to different entities (seller and eBay). GSP is discouraging for everyday purchasing of items under $200. For cheap items it's beyond ludicrous. I was just looking at a little slide rule, Buy It Now price US$3.99. Shipping via GSP $23.56 for something weighing about 28 g that could be sent as a USPS First Class International Letter for $1.41.

marnotom! · ‎07-23-2021

@aramatic wrote:

Thanks for some clarification, though no one has accounted for my original example of a $99.99 item being reduced to $85 and the shipping increased by $17, which is a wonderful example of giving with one hand and taking with the other, except that the hands belong to different entities (seller and eBay).

Again, it's likely a matter of location, location, location. Remember I said that pre-checkout, the GSP bot seems to emply a "worst case scenario" for its calculations made after the listing goes up. I'm betting that in addition to the import charges, the shipping charge will drop for that item at checkout once the shipping location is established as somewhere in British Columbia.

@aramatic wrote:

GSP is discouraging for everyday purchasing of items under $200. For cheap items it's beyond ludicrous. I was just looking at a little slide rule, Buy It Now price US$3.99. Shipping via GSP $23.56 for something weighing about 28 g that could be sent as a USPS First Class International Letter for $1.41.

What you don't mention is the seller's charge for shipping the slide rule within the United States. Remember, the shipping charge you see for a GSP-forwarded item is the seller's domestic shipping charge plus the GSP's charge for shipping the item from Kentucky to its final destination.

Also consider that if the seller doesn't provide enough information for the GSP bot to work with to calculate a shipping rate, it's going to take a guess based on a category average. Averages being averages, this is great if the item is heavy, not so great if the item is small.

Keep in mind, though, that USPS is cracking down on the use of lettermail for international shipments. If the seller were to stick a customs form on that lettermail envelope with the slide rule in it, a postal clerk might insist that it be sent by First Class International Package instead, and you'd be looking at a shipping charge of somewhere around US$14.00.

aramatic · ‎07-25-2021

Here's another one... just looked at a vintage calculator on eBay.com, $89.99 + $13.27 GPS. Click on Buy It Now and $8.45 "import charge" is added. Make offer of $80. GPS still $13.27 but "import charge" rises to $14.61. So a reduced price leads instantly to a higher "import charge"! As I've said, these figures may as well be plucked out of the air. And the buyer doesn't benefit and the seller doesn't benefit, but eBay and Pitney-Bowes do.

marnotom! · ‎07-26-2021

@aramatic wrote:

Here's another one... just looked at a vintage calculator on eBay.com, $89.99 + $13.27 GPS. Click on Buy It Now and $8.45 "import charge" is added. Make offer of $80. GPS still $13.27 but "import charge" rises to $14.61. So a reduced price leads instantly to a higher "import charge"! As I've said, these figures may as well be plucked out of the air. And the buyer doesn't benefit and the seller doesn't benefit, but eBay and Pitney-Bowes do.

The charges aren't plucked out of the air. The problem seems to be that the "Best Offer" bot and the GSP bot aren't fully connected to each other and don't "see" the shipping location you've set yourself up with when viewing listings.

The import charges you saw when you clicked "Buy it now" were based on the location you set up, in this case, British Columbia. A US$90 item shipped to BC will incur import charges made up of a calculation of 5% GST and processing charges, so US$4.50 (GST) + US$3.95 (GSP) = US$8.45.

When you move into "Best Offer" mode, the GSP bot calculates an estimate of the import charges based on a worst case scenario, the highest possible taxes and the associated processing charges, so on a US$80 item you'd be looking at US$12.00 (15% HST) + US$2.61 (GSP) = US$14.61. No idea why the estimated processing charges are lower for the Maritimes and Newfoundland/Labrador than BC, but, hey, that's an estimate calculated by a bot for you.

If you go back to that thread about Best Offer I linked to in message 5, you'll see that someone got these wacky import charges, went through checkout anyway, and found that the import charges sorted themselves out at the time they paid once the buyer's location was confirmed.

Just out of curiosity, why do you do your searching/browsing on the .com site, anyway? Don't the items you're looking for come up pretty readily on .ca?

aramatic · ‎07-26-2021

Perhaps I'm not as well off as people who buy things and let "the wacky import charges ... sort themselves out". I want to know exactly what I'm paying before I commit. Not an unreasonable expectation.

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎07-26-2021

@aramatic wrote:
Here's another one... just looked at a vintage calculator on eBay.com, $89.99 + $13.27 GPS. Click on Buy It Now and $8.45 "import charge" is added. Make offer of $80. GPS still $13.27 but "import charge" rises to $14.61. So a reduced price leads instantly to a higher "import charge"! As I've said, these figures may as well be plucked out of the air. And the buyer doesn't benefit and the seller doesn't benefit, but eBay and Pitney-Bowes do.

For transparency and a buyers piece of mind if you recieved an actual breakdown of the charges EVEN if they are being paid on behalf of the buyer it would be most helpful. From past experience if you had duties/taxes/processing for anything arriving with CP you got a physical copy of those charges automatically. With PB and eBay it was never a concept. If you are a customer of PB and use them as your business's customs broker you get a break down of all charges with every invoice. Why? Because it's a required declarable business expense. With eBay it's described loosely as a value added service for buyers and as seller protection. More like just a money generator for PB that causes inflated/slow unreliable delivery for the buyers that it affects!!

-Lotz

reallynicestamps · ‎07-26-2021

If you are a customer of PB and use them as your business's customs broker

And there you are.

The GSP was set up as a Seller Protection program for nervous and xenophobic sellers.

Private sellers not businesses.

Selling to private buyers not businesses.

The GSP import charge is not broken down because the private buyer has no need for a breakdown (except perhaps emotionally as you point out).

Canada Post is dealing with both private and commercial customers. And of course, is charging those import fees on the doorstep (these days at the PO counter).

If you are buying in the USA or UK from a seller who is using GSP but is generally supplying businesses, it might be a good idea to contact him about setting up private listings for your business. Or just to explain how GSP is not a good fit for B2B transactions.

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎07-26-2021

CP transactions are B2B and Seller to End User.

All I'm saying is show your math!!

-Lotz

marnotom! · ‎07-26-2021

@aramatic wrote:

Perhaps I'm not as well off as people who buy things and let "the wacky import charges ... sort themselves out". I want to know exactly what I'm paying before I commit. Not an unreasonable expectation.

All listings where the GSP is used state that the import charges are "confirmed at checkout" because there's no way to ensure that the shipping location used while the buyer is browsing the listing is the same one that's going to be used at checkout. This isn't just a GSP thing; for non-GSP-assisted sales, buyers could change their location at checkout and end up with a different shipping charge.

In cases like yours, however, one doesn't necessarily need a calculator--vintage or otherwise--to work out 5% of the item's selling price and to subtract that from the total import charges to get a sense of Pitney Bowes' share. That share can then be added to 5% of the "best offer" or seller's discounted item to get what one hopes would be slightly inflated finalized import charges.