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Reasons for losing money on a sale and how to prevent it
Reasons for losing money on a sale and how to prevent it

Negative profits from Taxes Timing or Limits

Nina Gaevska avatar
Written by Nina Gaevska
Updated over a week ago

READ TIME: 120 seconds

If you've lost money on a sale, here's a few possible reasons for that and how you can prevent it in the future.

😨Taxes

If you're in the UK click here to learn about VAT taxes.
Taxes are impossible to predict and retailers charge tax in almost every state. We can't know which state your next buyer is going to buy from; and since each state charges different tax rates we couldn't predict what percent to increase your margins by.
There are 3 solutions.

  1. Use FBE to let us place the orders for you. FBE saves 9% of your expenses to Amazon on average.

  2. You can increase your margins much higher to make sure you cover the highest tax % you might incur.

  3. You can charge sales tax on eBay from the tax table options. Click here.
    Charging taxes to your buyers without a sales tax permit is against the law. You'll also need to remit those taxes to each state.
    Make sure you understand the laws around charging taxes to your buyers.
    eBay is strict on charging tax; they may require proof of your sales tax permits.

👔 You need to consult a tax professional about charging tax

⌛Repricing timing

Easync checks prices every 15 minutes.
Another reason you might lose money is something like in the example below.
Easync repriced at 1:00 and the source market price was $10.00, your eBay listing sold for $15.00
The source market changed their price to $20.00 at 1:05 (5 minutes after easync did a price check)
Someone committed to purchase your product for the $15.00 eBay price at 1:10
You now have to buy a $20.00 item, and you only got paid $15.00 for it.

This is extremely rare but it does happen where someone just happens to buy something in the very small window of time during Easync's price check and source market price increase.
Your options are to tell the buyer that you are very sorry but this item is out of stock at that price and you cancel the order; or you just eat the loss and ship them the item anyway. Read about how to cancel an order without getting punished by eBay.

You can prevent this situation by having extremely high margins. I don't recommend having high margins until you are in the thousands of listings and you have an anchor store. If you want to go ahead and upgrade to the anchor store click here.

🚧Disabled Auto Ordering or Order Failed

If your order failed, click here to for some tips.
If you disable Auto Ordering or an order fails, a situation similar to the one above could occur. You sell an item for $10.00 during the night while you are asleep, at work, or away from your computer; and you like to manually order your items to save the $0.20 cents on AO/Tracking. You get back to your computer later to find that the source price of the product has gone up in the few hours you were away from your computer. You now risk losing a lot of money because you were trying to save 20 cents. We actually give you the option to disable tracking upload so you could just pay 10 cents on AO and avoid this altogether.

Click here to enable AO and set it all up correctly.

⛔Reached Seller Limits

You also might have reached your seller limits set by eBay. Repricing and quantity adjustments won't work if you are very close to maxing out your seller limits. You need to always keep around 5% of your limits free for Easync to allow items to go in and out of stock properly and be able to handle the dollar amount for the usage on the limits.
You'll need to check on both parts of your limits, your quantity limits and your dollar amount limits.
Click here to read about eBay seller limits and how to find out what your limits are.

What's next?

Hopefully you have a pretty good grasp on everything. If you need to refer back here's a link that will take you to the "selling on eBay or Shopify" help topics.

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