"A buyer sent an offer on an item and I accepted. The buyer purchased the item and I shipped the item to the address eBay has on file in the United States. I was unaware the buyer's registered address was in China until I viewed my "Fee Details" and noticed that I was charged an International fee. How is it I am charged an international fee? What is happening?" Did your buyer ever contact you to tell you about any problem?
My selling ID has sold maybe close to 10 items over the years to buyers with registered addresses in Russia and sometimes China or European countries. And I have never, ever, not one time had any negative feedback or other bad consequences from any of those sales.
I am not delighted with Russia as a nation these days, based on what I see in the news, but I have found that my Russian buyers are regular people just like most of us, who buy things from me that they can't find in their country. And truthfully, I haven't had any Russian or Ukrainian buyers since their problems started earlier this year.
To your question, how is it you are charged an international fee, the simple answer is that eBay charges this fee because they can. And it is described in the User Agreement. There's a link to the User Agreement at the bottom of every page, when you're on a computer as opposed to a phone.
Once you open the User Agreement, go to Item 5, Fees and Taxes. Within the second paragraph, you'll see the words "selling fees" in a hyperlink, underlined and/or in a different color. When you click on that hyperlink, you are taken to Selling Fees. Scroll through that document until you see the heading, "International fees."
Here (in
green) is precisely what the User Agreement (for US eBay sellers) says about International Fees:If your registered address is in the US, we charge an International fee if either:- The delivery address for the item (entered by the buyer during checkout) is outside the US,or
- The buyer's registered address is outside the US (regardless of the delivery address for the item)
This fee is calculated as 1.65% of the total amount of the sale and is automatically deducted from your sales.
I've also italicized one very important word in that quote: address. The one and only determinant factor in whether eBay imposes the international fee is address. The location of the payment source (bank or credit card company) means nothing. Lots of people who post here seem to get this detail about the international fee wrong.
