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eBay Selling Limit Situation
 

A quick summary on how I ended up on Aspkin ( relevant to the situation I need advice with):

Like most people here, legit eBay member for over 10 years and had about 250 or so 100% positive feedback with 4.8 and up DSR. No chargebacks on paypal, but had 2 refunds over the past 12 or so months. Anyway, I had an item listed on eBay and a potential buyer contacted me and offered to pay direct through paypal and we would split the savings on eBay fees. I agreed since I sell high value items ($3500 plus) so the fees are quite substantial.

Buyer pays, I ship item out to him, he receives item. Apparently he has purchased a high end test equipment that he does not know how to use so after a week he calls me and says he would like to return item for a refund. I say sure no problem, ship it back and I will give you a 100% refund. I wake up next morning to find out the the ignorant d*#$bag has gone and filed a chargeback with his credit card THE SAME DAY HE CALLED ME TO ASK FOR A REFUND. So you know the story from here; paypal limited, under review, then the we no longer want your business email. Devastating to say the least, my main source of income gone! I cried and pleaded on the phone with PayPal for weeks to no avail. So I started searching for alternatives, found aspkin and have slowly been using stealth to eke out a small living ...

Back to my legit account; my PayPal is permanently limited but my eBay is in this weird state where I cannot list any new items but I can keep selling the ones already listed as long as the buyer agrees to pay via another method other than paypal.

So I was messing around a few weeks ago and opened a new stealth eBay + PayPal, verified the PayPal account and then linked the new eBay account to my old legit one when requesting for limit increase. Guess what? No Limits! Of course I'm still limited by the fact that PP will want a SSN once I approach the 20k limit which will be pretty quick for me.

So my question is, if I keep opening new eBay and PayPal accounts and linking the new eBay account to the old one will my luck eventually run out? As in, is there a limit on the number of accounts you can link via requesting limit increase? I'm also thinking to do an EIN paypal and hopefully try to avoid any disputes that will lead to limitation and request for SSN.

Sorry for the long post, and responses are appreciated, thanks!

kkoneo welcome to forum.

You got very luck but DO NOT link new ebay and paypal to old account as it will be pointless if one account goes down the the rest will follow.

Also Do not count your luck with the new account and no limits as It can be shutdown anytime since it is linked to the weird state ebay.

Baloch

Thanks for the reply. Well the thing is my old eBay account is pretty much worthless to me now as I can't sell or buy from it so I don't care if they close it down. But by linking new accounts to it, I automatically get limits removed from the new account; so I sell with the new account till I get close to $20K, then I link another waiting eBay account and start process over again.

I'd be more worried about the Tax man catching up to you than eBay taking away something you didn't have to begin with.

From the outside, it could look like a way to avoid the IRS, then you have a whole other list of problems coming your way.

No, I'm not looking for a way to avoid the tax man. I pay taxes on all my earnings including those from stealth late last year. With this scenario, I would still pay taxes on all my stealth account. The 20k limit I mentioned was due to the PayPal thing where you get limited after reaching or getting close to 20k in sales, not because I'm trying to avoid taxes. Believe me, I would gladly pay an extra 5% in taxes to have my old legit account back.

EIN will get you past the limits on PayPal. However, selling high ticket items with low feedback on eBay would be tough. You almost have to sprinkle in some cheap stuff used clothes and household items from time to time just to boost feedback.

Welcome to the forums - all the best.

1st, and most importantly.. Purchase Stealth Book... All your worries will be over.
Next.

Start slow, build slow, keep opening accounts, 2 - e b ay, to 1 pp... Open 1 ebay, wait a month, open another, w/ same details etc, to Original PP..

Next open up a completely different set, with different details, and repeat...

Before you know it you'll have 10+ manageable accounts, in case one goes down, you have backups, and items being constantly sold.

Enjoy, and read around.. Plenty of information

I agree with you but if you sell more above the IRS threshold you have a problem if you SSN is burned because you can not get unlimited EIN numbers without raising some kind of flag.

I do have the stealth book, first thing I did and not bad for $30. Great information in there.

However ... stealth does not work so well for eBayers like me that deal more with higher end items. For me, I was selling 2 items a week on average and each would be priced anywhere from $2k to $7k. With stealth accounts you would burn through them like a hot knife through butter due to 20K rule. So PayPal would be my bottleneck here :).

Which is why I was thinking to link a new eBay account to my old one and then EIN verify a new paypal account, but try to be VERY careful not to get a limitation on it and see how long that one can last. Of course I would start of selling at a nice and easy pace, and I can leave a substantial amount of money sitting in my PayPal account to make things look a bit better.

makaveliagain is right ... that would be a HUGE red flag to keep applying for new EIN under a different pretext every other week, lol

Old info may get through here and there but there's always the risk of a hard block.