A Tale Of The Three Stooges - Donating - eBay, PayPal and Missionfish.

[SgtRock]

Greetings EEVBees:

--I have been donating 10% of every eBay sale, using the eBay Donation procedure, to the Marine Corps and Law Enforcement Foundation, which helps the children of the fallen, with educational expenses. However, I will never do so again, I will make my donations directly, for the following reasons:

--eBay regularly informs me that, I cannot list new items, because I have past due donations, even though I pay all fees the day they are listed. At present I can make no new listings, and when I go to my donation account, it says (rightly enough) that I have no donations due. This occurs every other day. Sometimes I make a donation, it is recorded by eBay and PayPal, and then one or two months later, it turns up as never paid, and I am told I cannot make another listing till I pay. Then when I pay again, it may or may not actually go through, or it may be backed out, and then relisted. And even when it does appear to go through, it may or may not list. In the meantime I can not list any new items.

--I have spent approximately 10 hours, on hold with eBay and PayPal trying to sort these errors, with each blaming the other and transferring me, so I can listen to recordings telling me how great they are. eBay is by far the worst for obfuscation and buck passing. They never fix the problem and they never make the promised call back. When I really put the heat on them they transfer me to someone with an impenetrable accent, and a two second delay. When I mentioned that they kept, interrupting me, they told me there was a delay. I told them that perhaps they might consider taking cognizance of this fact and wait to see if the other person is responding before barging on, or to say "Over" and then waiting for acknowledgement, but to no avail. Apparently the policy is to say something, wait half the time of the delay and then start chattering again as if the customer must be to confused to speak. This combined with what is sometimes a thick Mumbai accent, makes for a frustrating experience, even though these people are usually more intelligent that the statesiders.

--Missionfish only ever sends emails which say you need to renew your payment details. So, I have reentered the same old original information, sometimes this works, sometimes it does not.

--Once you decide to never use eBay donations again, you have to manually delete all listings, containing donations, as they cannot be edited out, what effing genius thought of that one. It only took me a couple of hours, as I am a small time player. Can you imagine, the grief this must have caused for someone with 500+ listings.

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
H.L. Mencken 1880 - 1956

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[saturation]

Sorry to hear.  You should read the fine print before donating to such things.

eBay's administrative expenses for a charity are high even if they didn't give you trouble with your processing.

http://community.ebay.com/t5/eBay-Giving-Works-Board/MissionFish-Donation/td-p/1342453

Many "charities" in the USA are actually businesses; charity is the product but supporting the staff and the salaries of the administration is the real goal, You should target administrative expenses of 5% or less, and even that is high.  By comparison, many Vanguard investments run expenses [ including admin costs] below 0.20% of gross income, and Vanguard still manages to pay all its employees.  I find it immoral to have donated labor to many 'charities' while the professional administrators are paid in full with salaries competitive with equivalent revenue sized corporations.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_111649.html

[madires]

eBay and PayPal just want your money, they provide ZERO service. eBay isn't even capable to fulfill a request which is mandated by local law. I ditched them a long time ago.

[SgtRock]

Greetings EEVBees:

--I am not quite sure, just what it is the preceding post (now deleted) was trying to say here. I am also not quite sure that I have a dog in the fight referred to. As a US Veteran, with other Veterans and Police Officers in my family, including some who are among the fallen, I rather like the MCLEF, but I have always recommended that other EEVBees, donate to whatever charity they like. I am still trying to puzzle out a connection between this and some purported conspiracy involving evangelicals, banks,  the UN, and Space Aliens (I just made the last one up).  I am not objecting to what was said, I just don't know what it is. If anyone can translate, please do.

--Again I recommend donating to your favorite charity (directly, and not by eBay), as well as your favorite electronic engineering blog. The latest good news, is that apparently I have disengaged myself from eBay donations, and have been promised that I will be struck from the rolls of Missionfish within 5 working days.

"Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level."
Enrico Fermi 1901 - 1954

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[marshallh]

If you want to see an even bigger profiteering industry look no further than breast cancer organizations

[TerraHertz]

Firstly ebay and Paypal are one entity, just with two names.
Secondly, it's a rapacious, immoral, uncaring and dishonest corporate profit engine.

There's unlikely that much if any money you pour into their 'donate' funnel ever ends up anywhere but in their own pockets. And how are you going to know? Even if they publish figures, could you believe anything ebay/paypal said? I wouldn't.

Good for you for wanting to help the needy. But you're not going to achieve anything useful via that channel.

[Simon]

Firstly ebay and Paypal are one entity, just with two names.
Secondly, it's a rapacious, immoral, uncaring and dishonest corporate profit engine.

There's unlikely that much if any money you pour into their 'donate' funnel ever ends up anywhere but in their own pockets. And how are you going to know? Even if they publish figures, could you believe anything ebay/paypal said? I wouldn't.

Good for you for wanting to help the needy. But you're not going to achieve anything useful via that channel.

I have to agree there, they act like two companies while they are the same and just run you around in circles. The latest brilliant idea they have is to try and make ebay like amazon and ignore the many hard working sellers that 1) have bought the effing stock and invested the money unlike ebay and 2) unlike ebay know about the stuff they sell and have to deal with customers.

I doubt very much that charities see much of what ebay collect. I am getting really fed up with the way charitable status is being abused, many charities are just companies dodging taxes etc and here in the UK a few intersting schemes were cooked up like a charity that leds you money, you then donate the money back to the charity, as a higher tax payer you get 20% tax releif and the "charity" can claim gift aid at 20%. result: the government gives away free money.

I am also getting sick of "charity collectors" knocking on my door trying to bully me into setting up direct debits that are collected by the COMPANY they work for and charities see little if anything.

We live in a sick world where there is no such thing as justice and if your rich your allowed to rip people off because your paying some of the tax (after negotiating a deal for a discount from the tax man) you earn from your near illegal and definitely immoral actions.

I am trying to move over to ebid, I'm sick of ebay, they are expensive tossers that could not care less than putting on a pretty face to get their cut.

[EEVblog]

I am trying to move over to ebid, I'm sick of ebay, they are expensive tossers that could not care less than putting on a pretty face to get their cut.

I'd love to ditch ebay too (and PayPal), but they are really still the only game in town to reach the widest buying audience. Here in oz there is Gumtree which is a reasonable alternative, but that's owned by ebay too 
There are alternatives to PayPal like PayMate, but once again, everyone uses it, so I'm essentially forced to use it.

[Simon]

Yes unfortunately ebay and paypal are the defacto standard. But I'm hoping that some people will start to show them how pathetic they are by using alternatives and so i offer alternatives on my own website and ebid now although running all these things simultaneously is a pain. I just wish ebay would pay tax in the UK, I don't know what is wrong with this government, all they have to do is change the flipping law. If the buyer resides in the Uk the tax is paid in the Uk end of !