I haven’t sold anything on ebay in forever, but now I have an item I want to put up there.
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Time was, you linked your Paypal account and the buyer paid you through that.
But now it seems that ebay is requiring my bank account and routing number to post an item, and that seems to be the only way to go.
Am I right about this?
Am I being reasonable in not wanting to provide that info?
mmm
You are correct, this is how it works now. They switched to this system in 2022 I think?
I guess it’s reasonable to be hesitant to provide the checking account info, that’s not unusual. If you have a hard and fast rule to never give anyone your banking info then yeah, you’re not going to be able to do eBay anymore.
But if you’re ok giving your banking info to other places where you pay bills, like the electric company or your insurance company, I would put eBay’s security on par with theirs and you should be fine to do it.
You also have the option of payout to a debit card, for a 1.5% fee. I don’t know if that’s a more suitable option for you or not.
Thanks, @ZipperJJ. I think I’m going to pass on selling on ebay.
mmm
I just started selling again after several years (I was a big eBay seller 20 years ago). I find the new changes extremely annoying, but there is really no reasonable alternative.
So, I opened a Capital One account. They will let you open a no-fee account with no minimum balance. I put $100 in it just to test it, and then linked that to eBay. So far, it works fine.
Oh, one other thing - the days of handwaving non-employee compensation are gone. As soon as I had sold over $600 worth of stuff, eBay asked for my SSN, so that they could 1099 me.
I understand why eBay does it this way, sort of. It gives them a 2.9% boost per transaction (previously 2.9% went to PayPal). And it might help weed out whatever problems they might have had with shady, fly-by-night sellers. Needing a bank account really makes you “real.”
But it does indeed put up a barrier to entry for selling on eBay. I can imagine a lot of casual sellers are having the same thoughts as @Mean_Mr.Mustard and not wanting to put in their bank info to sell that one random thing they were hoping to get some bucks for.
Granted, eBay is by FAR not the only game in town now. Used to be eBay or Craigslist and nothing inbetween. Now every social platform has a marketplace, even Netxdoor. You’ve got your Mercari, your Poshmark, your Reverb, your whatever. So maybe eBay is not worried about losing their casual seller. They can go elsewhere and be someone else’s “problem.”
Gonna suck if eBay is ALL just “storefronts” for flippers and resellers. Never fear, though - I’m still there, cleaning out my closets and basement one weird t-shirt and action figure at a time. You can still buy my junk! Hopefully there are more out there like me.
The good old days.
In the UK, this information is printed on the cheques my bank provides, not that I use them anymore.
Is this not the case in the USA? So whenever you pay someone by cheque, they will be able to see your name, sort code and account number.
Yes, that is exactly the case, although from reading various threads about the practice, most people don’t use checks at all any more. Having your routing number and account number does not give anyone the ability to go in and rifle your account. Nor is it additional information to help with identity theft. It is basically already public knowledge.
I have several auto-pay bills set up to withdraw directly from my checking account – utilities, mortgage, things like that. I prefer that setup because I don’t have to worry about my credit card being changed because it was compromised, or my debit cart expiring every couple of years. Not every entity supports doing it that way, but when it does, that’s how I have it set up. Yes, I lose out on the 1.5% cash back or whatever the credit card might pay, but to me it’s worth it to avoid the hassles.
With all the ways that scammers use to extract money from the rest of us, it is not surprising that some people are (in my view) excessively cautious.
This is related to the whole area of risk management and a general inability to evaluate true risk from perceived risk. The same thing that allows us to drive to an airport but still be afraid of flying.
Direct debits (auto-pay) are a useful feature that ensures that variable bills like utilities get paid on time. Suppliers often offer discounts to people who use this method. I do not put DDs on my credit cards though. I vaguely recall that it can be problematic, but not the actual reason. Something to do with cancellation problems I think.
I used to use Paypal for some transactions but then found that some places charge extra. These days, I only use it for charity appeals.
Not that I use eBay for either buy or sell, but what happens for non-US-Residents?
This. Open a sacrificial checking account. If something hinky happens, the only thing anyone can mess up the the dollars you leave in there.
Years ago my wife took a part-time job in a legit industry, but the business owner seemed pretty shady. And of course used a payroll service that only did direct deposit and you had to sign an agreement that they could resolve any “errors” in their deposits by making an unscheduled no-approval-required withdrawal. The payroll service itself was a trustworthy name-brand operator. But they’d probably process any and all lies the shady owner might give them.
We opened a sacrificial account at the same bank where we did our regular banking. Because we kept a decent balance across the other accounts, there was no fee for this new account.
Whenever her pay arrived in that sacrificial account we transferred it to our real account later that day. Not so onerous.
This thread reminded me that I really have no need for eBay any longer. I sold my share of stuff on there, and bought some good things, but I no longer have any desire to do that, so why leave something active that may be subject to a data breach? So goodbye to 20 some years of membership.
Yep. And for decades upon decades, everyone paid their bills- and bought stuff at stores, and etc with checks. Some people still do.
Correct.
Same here.
According to the statistics here, 31% of sellers are from the US, 29% from UK, 15% from Germany, 12% from China, 4% from Australia and 2% from Italy.
eBay has 22 global sites (ebay.com.au, ebay.co.uk, etc), one in each of those top countries, except China. But they do have sites in eastern Asian countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
I’m thinking people don’t sell outside of their country’s eBay. And for the few that do, they have a bank account in the country they are selling from. Shipping costs would be more of a barrier to profitable sales than the lack of access to a bank account.
I’m a bit confused about this. I also have several accounts on autopay, and as far as I remember, setting up autopay just required me to enter my routing number and account number in the company’s website. So it seems to me that someone who has those numbers CAN withdraw funds from your account.
I’m confused by your confusion. Aren’t allowing deposits and allowing withdrawals two different things?
To be fair, it never occurred to me that my account number and my routing number are printed on the thousands of checks I’ve written over the years.
Maybe it’s not a big deal after all.
mmm
There are strong protections on the consumer side. ACH debits fall under the same Reg E rules that unauthorized credit card txns do. All you’d need to do it contact your bank & fill out a form (possibly electronically/online, depending upon your bank) saying that the txn in question is unauthorized. You’ll be given provisional credit & your back will go back to the other bank, who goes to their customer (the originator) & basically say, “prove it”. Unless the originator can come back with a duly approved form that you (electronically?) signed, you’d keep the funds in your acct & they get a black mark against them. If they get enough black marks against them their bank will remove their ability to initiate ACHs / close their accts. Remember, not everyone can initiate ACHs, it’s an additional service that a business customer has to signup for & part of that is an extra agreement/contract that you’ll abide by all of the NACHA rules,
ACHs are routinely returned every day by a bank. Each return reason has it’s own unique code - NSF, Acct closed, invalid acct # (especially with one-time / first time payments where someone makes a typo in entering the acct #), & even some for R-10 - Unauthorized.
If someone in the UK gives me their name, sort code and A/C No. I can send them money on a near-instant transfer. Until recently I didn’t even need to know the name, but security has been tightened up. For the same reason, the bank also makes me confirm by phone when I set up a new recipient.
Of course, if they give me their passcodes and phone, I can log into their account and transfer money to a fake account I set up.
Exactly. They don’t transfer money out of your account, their bank does. Obviously, banks are going to seriously vet any business client wanting to do automatic withdrawals; presumably if the withdrawal client takes the money and disappears, their bank is on the hook so they have an incentive to do a good job. IANABanker but it seems to me a pretty elementary precaution. Any bank that habitually allows fraudulent transactions is on the short path to disconnection from the banking system.