Quitcherbitchen
You'll Feel Better
The writer Mark Manson (author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck) is a stoic philosopher who advocates not putting your mental energy into things that are not worthy of the effort, of the given ‘fuck’, as a way of lightening the cognitive load we all carry. I love the idea and find that it works beautifully. Today, we touch on some of the whine-memes about eBay that percolate through the hobby regularly and that have a Frankenstein’s monster-like capacity to keep popping up despite being beyond our capacities to change.
Folks, it is time to stop fantasizing about eBay (aka feeBay) costs going down. Yes, eBay has steadily jacked up its pricing. Yes, eBay has the audacity to charge a final value fee on the sales taxes it collects; and no, for the thousandth time, that is not illegal. Yes, every change eBay makes is designed to extract more money from sellers, and that will never change. But guess what? eBay is a for-profit corporation operating in the most nakedly and brutally capitalist society this side of the Ferengi: of course, it jacks up fees as high as it can possibly go. Pierre Omidyar didn’t found eBay because he wanted to make the world a better place; he wanted to make money…and has the billions to prove it. The only restraint on what eBay charges is that if the fees truly approach what an auction house charges, many would choose to go with an auction house and not have to deal with the joys of customer interaction and order fulfillment; there is a definite friction cost to dealing with the dweebs and mental defectives that troll eBay, and with packing and shipping orders. Just last week, FedEx damaged a Springsteen poster that I sold and I had to refund the sale price and the shipping costs paid, and write off the cost of the poster. D’oh!
No, eBay collecting sales taxes and charging sellers a final value fee on sales taxes it collects is not going away. The collection of taxes per se should not clench anyone’s butthole unless you acknowledge that sales taxes on goods as presently configured are among the most regressive taxes around and that it would be fairer to slash sales tax rates but expand them to include services, which is where wealthy people spend most of their disposable income. No? OK, then let’s admit that the outrage over eBay collecting sales taxes makes no sense to a law-abiding citizen. I live in a state that imposes sales taxes on the sale of goods; I must pay sales taxes. I also owe taxes on items that are brought into the state for my personal use—the “use tax”. I have never understood the outrage over being charged sales taxes (or owing use taxes) on our collections. We pay ‘em every damn day on everything from shampoo to tires, so why is there such an outpouring of anger when we have to pony up on our cards? If you don’t want to pay sales taxes, sign up for a vault service and have your cards shipped there. Odds are your state has a rule on how long the item has to be held in another state before it can be brought into your state tax-free. Last time I checked, the rule in Cali was 90 days. If it is cheaper to ship twice (to the vault and then to you) instead of once and pay the cost to vault it, then by all means, avoid the sales taxes and use taxes and send your cards into limbo for a few months. I definitely agree that at least for us sellers, eBay fans the flames of resentment by charging sellers a final value fee on every sales tax payment it collects. If I sell a $4,000 card into a 10% sales tax jurisdiction, it costs me an extra sixty bucks or so. None of that surprises me, though. Again, a nakedly capitalist company that has turned sales taxes into a profit center. Between that and the final value fees on shipping, I’ve had to tack a handling fee onto every order to cover my losses. I can’t change that so…I don’t give a fuck.
I also don’t get all the frothing at the mouth over eBay issuing 1099s. Maybe that is because of my trade: one of the microaggressions that the dimwitted charlatans in Congress threw at us lawyers years ago was to decree that every payment made to a lawyer gets a 1099. Doesn’t burden me—I’m not the one who has to track and send in the damn forms. That would be my clients. I simply receive, disregard, and shred stacks of them every year. A 1099 is just a report to the IRS of what I sold on eBay. Let’s be blunt here: having eBay send out 1099s only ticks off sellers who cheat on their taxes. I keep records of my sales, declare my income, pay my taxes. Ho hum. My eBay 1099 goes right into the shredder with the rest of them. Oh, and as the government stretches and searches for every possible source of revenue, you better believe that 1099s are coming for other venues, like auction houses. Also straight into the shredder. My feeling as a legitimate seller in a sales tax state is that it is quite convenient for eBay to collect, remit and report sales taxes instead of me doing the work, and worth the small % it costs me. As for the dreaded 1099, well, I maintain proper business records so when I get a 1099…I don’t give a fuck.
The fact remains that if you have good items and price them well, eBay is the best marketplace. Its reach is incredibly deep and worldwide. Whenever I need to turn items into cash quickly or when I want to sell some variety of crap from my Festival of Bric-A-Brac collection that defies easy auction house categorization, eBay is my go-to. Picking means that I find and sell a lot of esoteric items, a lot of cards outside the big 4 sports, and a lot of lesser value cards. If an auction house even takes those items, they are going to be lotted into 'shoeboxes' to generate the minimum per lot that auctioneers like to get; in other words, I am wholesaling to some other dealer. I’d rather retail the stuff, even as bulk lots, so it goes on eBay. Just in the last few weeks I’ve sold a first edition novel, collectible figurines, stacks of automotive promotional postcards and a collection of Academy Awards tickets. No way could I sell those as profitably anywhere else. Some items I’ve sold on eBay were even turned down by auctioneers whose average lot sales prices are below what I got on eBay for those items. I accept eBay for what it is because the benefits outweigh the detriments, despite the predatory pricing and all the rest of its issues; as for its foibles I can only say…I don’t give a fuck.