Fee to be paid for foreign purchase, item 185825801781

[GelberOtto]

Hi,
I am living in Germany and frequently use Gixen to bid for items offered through the German EBay platform. Now it happened the first time that the seller told me he was charged by EBay for an extra fee because the item was sold to a foreign country. It appears that because of using Gixen it was considered by EBay that the bid was placed from a buyer based in the U.S..
Does this regularly happen, or is this an error possibly caused by proxy settings? On which basis is EBay allowed to charge such a fee?
With kind regards

[Cupid]

What target do you have set ?, The default is to place bids on the US .com site, however you can change that on the Settings page.

That said, I've never before heard of where the bid is placed having any affect on a seller, so that is curious. The main difference has always been the selling regulations that apply to the buyer.

The other thing that changes depending on the location of a buyer are the taxes that a due and are automatically collected by Ebay from the buyer, but as far as I am aware those are always based on the delivery address of the buyer, not on which site they choose to place their bid.

At the end of the day if there is a difference it's one that the seller needs to take up with Ebay, not something you should try to mitigate (though you might be able to by changing your target setting) and it's up to the seller to decide on which sites they are prepared to offer their items, via Ebay.

On which basis is Ebay allowed to charge such a fee? No idea, you are best off asking the seller, or even Ebay themselves; I would also be interested to know the answer to that since it might indicate what people need to do differently if they wish to avoid it.

Are you using their payment system directly or Paypal ?... Maybe that has some bearing on this issue ?
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Mark