This may not be new to some of you but I just got educated about it.

I did a "Buy It Now" on a 1902 Krag rifle sight for a good price from a relatively new seller (not bach1 or other Krag destroyers!) who only had a 25 feedback rating. When my invoice came through, which I did pay right away, it had sales tax added. I sent a message to the seller and asked him why he charged me sales tax and to refund it if he didn't have a good reason to do so. He is in Texas and I'm in Ohio.

I have heard some sellers charging sales tax who don't need to do so and pocketing it.

But, before he responded, I looked into ebay's fee policies and found the following table:

(You need to Login to view media files and links)

Seems that ebay has started to add sales tax to all invoices for any items purchased by buyers starting on dates listed in this table. They have started to do this in Ohio starting Sept 1, 2019. The seller is unaware of this added charge to the invoice since ebay does it automatically. The seller responded to me unaware it had been done and I explained to him what I had found out.

I have bought and sold on ebay since Oct. 1997, when it was still a small, unknown company. I have stopped selling larger items there because the shipping charges, as I found out with a recent sale, can often be more than the item sells for. I lost money on my last sale because of this. Remember that ebay steals 10% of your collected shipping charge as well as their commission charge they take for the sale price.

So, if you sell something on ebay, ebay takes 10% or more of the selling price, they take 10% of the postage charge you get from the buyer, PayPal takes their 3% or more, the post office or UPS or FedEX takes a huge amount for shipping and now the buyer pays sales tax.

ebay has continued to change in ways that they are pricing themselves out of the market for their profits. The cost is just too high for most stuff these days.