eBay Delayed Charge For Final Value Fees
UPDATE 11-29-22
eBay community staff have confirmed this is a known issue & impacted sellers should reference ALERT14305 when contacting support.
Hey @valueaddedresource! This is a known sitewide issue that has a ticket open for it to be resolved. If there are any sellers that are running into final value fees not be charged on items they have sold they can reach out to customer support here and let them know that you are running into ALERT14305.
However it appears the way eBay is retroactively charging these fees is going to create a massive bookkeeping headache for sellers - they only refer to an item number, not the order ID so there is no way for sellers to match up the fees to a specific sale. 🤯
Same here, I got hit with 32 pages of 30 items per page of after the fact fees. When you click on them There is only an item number and no explanation. Most of my listings are variation listing with up to 250 cards per listing and I might have 40 sales a month per listing so I have no way to check what order the fees came from.
I get weekly payouts and normally Tues morning my account balance is zero. In the past I would purchase labels and ebay would put my account in the negative and I could print the label. Now because of this mess my account is already in the negative and they are charging my bank account for all the label I print one at a time. What a mess!!!!
eBay sellers have been caught off guard by suddenly being charged lump sums for Final Value Fees they believed had already been paid.
So, today I checked my payments tab, and it turns out that they deducted final value fees from hundreds of items going back to mid-October. There is an entry for the final value fees and another for the 30-cent payment processing fee.
I went back and checked some items, and the fee amounts were dated today and yesterday. It appears the fees were not removed at the time of payment. Or, perhaps, that is how they want it to look. LOL
I have contacted the Facebook group and am awaiting a reply. I haven't seen any other comments on this subject in the forums. It seems odd that it would only affect me.
Just letting you know to check your transactions. It was a rude surprise before my morning coffee.
This was my experience this morning as well. Tons of fees far exceeding any sales money I had in my account, with huge batches of fees deducted over several hours last night. Was not expecting this at all, it gave me huge amounts of stress and anxiety heading into my day.
I was only able to contact someone via messaging chat, and I was assured the batches are caught up now, and should not happen again as FVFs will occur at the time of transaction like they are supposed to.
Back in October I was checking my sold items and realized eBay had not been taking FVF's out of the orders as they are bought. My last 5 sold items since Oct 19 have been this way. I contacted eBay and the CS rep said I could be on a special no fees promotion and not to worry as I wouldn't be charged for them.
Today I received a notice that my account on file was to be charged for $xx.xx. When I went to see what the charge was for since I hadn't sold anything the last week, it was for 2 of the items I sold in October that they hadn't taken the fees out of.
Has this happened to anyone else lately. I have 3 more sales that I know the fees were not deducted from. I guess I will be getting another invoice for them soon.
Got hit with this today. Two large charges to my credit card for FVF's I didn't even realize I owed. Just thought they had been taken out at the time of sale, like they have always been since I joined ebay payments.
We were charged over $2,000 in final value fees this morning for hundreds of items eBay did not collect FVF for. We had contacted eBay and they said it was a special promotion which is why we weren't being charged.
This is really annoying and feels like a bait and switch, we were expecting a much bigger payout this week.
I didn't realize it until November 23rd. When I looked back, they didn't take any final value fee's from October 1st thru November 20th or so. So in the past week or so I've essentially "lost"(not really) a little over $1000. This whole time I thought they were taking them out immediately as they said, so obviously I didn't think anything of it.
This morning I just paid another $440 in fee's that came thru in the last 12 hours. Thankfully, I think it's all caught up now but it's really messed up my cash flow. Had I would have known this, I would've just set the money aside like I used to when we paid monthly.
Back in February 2021, as part of the Spring Seller Update, eBay changed the billing procedure for Final Value Fees to be deducted immediately from sales proceeds rather than billed as a lump sum on a monthly basis, so most sellers at this point just assume fees have been deducted at the time of sale and would not be expecting to be hit with thousands of dollars of fees at once.
While it does not appear these sellers have been double billed (they were not charged fees at the time of sale) this sort of unexpected large deduction can cause a major cash flow crunch and the height of the holiday shopping season is a particularly terrible time for many sellers to take a hit to cash flow.
It's not entirely clear yet what happened, but several affected sellers mentioned being told by customer service there was a promotion that meant they weren't going to be charged FVF and then they ended up being charged after the fact any way.
That reminded me of a very similar situation which happened right around this same time last year - eBay had a major billing snafu when they ran a no final value fee promotion that was supposed to only apply to Personalized items, but was instead being applied to many sales for items that should not have qualified as well.
Liz Morton ~ Founder
Once the "glitch" was discovered, eBay went back and retroactively charged the fees for sales that should not have qualified for the promotion, leaving sellers once again in a cash flow crunch, just like those impacted by the current issue.
I'll continue to look into this issue and update once I have more information.
In the meantime, if you've suddenly been hit with a large final value fee charge from eBay, let us know in the comments below!
