I've been trying to find an answer for this question for some time. I am selling a number of items on eBay donating 100% of the item sales to charity, some of which we had included free postage on.
When the money hit my Paypal account standard fees were taken at 0.34% + 20p transaction fee. These were taken irrespective of whether there was a postage amount included in the listing, so clearly were taken on the total value of the item.
I had thought that when Paypal giving took the money from my Paypal account and donated it that the fees would be refunded for the item amount and would show on the invoice, however again this doesn't appear to be the case - or not obviously apparent.
While this is not a major issue on smaller lower cost items as the cost of the fees can be absorbed into the postage just, I have recently sold some more expensive items, which when including the fees that Paypal takes means that I would be seriously out of pocket.
For example a £100 item with £3 postage would be subject to £3.70 worth of fees, meaning I end up 30p out of pocket just on the cost of the item, this doesn't include the actual costs for packaging and to post, assuming it costs to post what the postage charges are then I would end up £3.30 down, multiply that out over 100 items, and it would be £330. This doesn't seem right that PayPal would take the fees for the transaction when it is for Charity.
The only way around this would be to charge over the odds in postage, which means to price the items accordingly would mean that the charity actually ends up with less money as I would be then selling something for £90 with £13 postage, which most people will think is ridiculous even if I explained this in the listing.
Hoping that someone can give me a definitive answer on this, I've previously called eBay support who say that the fees should not be charged on a charity auction, I have tried to get in touch with PayPal just giving but never recieved a response or a phone call
