EBAY Charity Giving - very puzzled as to how it works in reality

[spongedog]

Hi, wondering if anyone can help explain this to me very simply. I decided earlier this year to give a % of all my sales (Private) on Ebay to a charity I support. The Ebay charity listings include this charity. So I thought that somehow the charity donation would be processed as part of the overall payment received from the buyer

I've now found on my paypal account that I need to pay this charity my charity donation explicitly. Is this how all you clever people knew it worked anyway? I feel like I am having to reconcile my EBAY account to my paypal account and set up a spreadsheet!! Seems a hassle for what are small sums of cash.

I must admit I don't try to reconcile my paypal account... I occasionally remember to transfer some money out of there. But yeah first you receive the money & then Ebay takes the donation back out of paypal. I don't find it a faff.

Remember that Paypal still take fees. So you want to keep postage a separate amount, and set the "postage" fee to cover the entire fees amount, for instance,

You sell something for £10 + £4 postage, 100% of the item to charity.
Ebay will take £10 for the postage.
Paypal will take £14 x 3.5% + 20p = 69p

Item actually costs you £3.10 to post, and you make a grand total of 21p profit on the 'postage' part, assuming parcel tape is free to you, but at least you aren't out of pocket for having donated to charity.

Thank you Joe for your reply. EBAY dont seem to be taking the donation out of paypal. There are invoices in Paypal that I have to now authorise. That's the bit I am finding odd. I did search the help function of both ebay and paypal but that was no help.