I’m an enthusiastic eBayer I buy and sell stuff all the time on it … it’s one of the few ways I can keep my computers up-to-date because I don’t earn a great deal and all of that goes to keeping us in a house, food, bills and a daughter in university. I’m also a humanist and like to donate money to charities I consider worthwhile … one of these is the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science (RDF) so you can imagine my excitement when I discovered that eBay had a charity facility awesome, now I could earn money to buy myself AND I could put money into something worthwhile.
Sure like every other seller I resent the fees eBay charges but more than that I get pissed when they screw up or do things badly. So the first problem I had was that when I created my charity account I couldn’t access it … I contacted MissionFish (the company that handled the charity arrangements) and they said it was eBay’s responsibility. So I contacted eBay and they said (you guessed it) it was MissionFish’s responsibility but that wasn’t what really bugged me (though it became relevant). My second problem was that the donation took no account of profit so I was being charged on my total money gained BEFORE eBay took the fees and that meant that in some situations (typically for smaller items) I could end up paying more out that I actually got back.
Being me, wanting to buy computer stuff with my hard earned cash, the first thing I wanted to do once I was sure the buyer was happy was spend it … but MissionFish have a setup rather like Direct Debit and took the money at a time of their choosing sometime in the next 30 days or so, without access to my charity account, I had to keep track of charity donations (which ones had and which ones had not been paid) and this was largely beyond my organisational abilities. It came to a head when I forgot I had a charity payment to be taken and was smacked by eBay bills and I didn’t have sufficient funds in PayPal to cover it so not only did I no longer have any funds to play with the next thing PayPal dowse is take it from your credit card … so, in my attempt to try and be slightly philanthropic I ended up in debt … result!
So I have given up using eBay/MissionFish as my charity donation mechanism and now directly advertise on eBay sales that I will give a percentage of my profits (once I know them) to RDF … this means I can easily manage when I pay my donations and even means I can donate more to RDF because I know what I am spending is exactly what I am spending and goes exactly when I want it to.
Sorry eBay/MissionFish … nice try but it just didn’t work for me.
Kyuuketsuki (Co-Founder: “Science, Just Science” Campaign)
