A Sucker Born Every Minute: Turbo Tax for eBay Sellers

Everyone wants to ride the eBay craze, but TurboTax’s recent attempt is lame, lame, lame.

I do my own taxes using Turbo Tax. I enjoy it and I always did them on my own, even before computers. I would read the directions and look up the trickier things in the booklets and I would fill in the work-sheets by hand. Although I deduct for Business Use of the Home, I am not frightened of doing my own taxes. Depreciation Schmapreciation I always say. I don’t want to pay someone $300 when the software available now does all the math, the worksheets, types it, and interprets the laws for you.

After 5 years of using Turbo Tax, I saw that there was a new product called “Turbo Tax for eBay Sellers”. I went ahead and bought it, thinking maybe it would somehow save me money. I could be overlooking something, or making a mistake.

I’d always put my eBay and PayPal fees under “Fees & Commissions” on my tax return, but I learned it doesn’t belong there. According to the wizard’s at Turbo Tax, it goes under “Other business expenses”. EBay fees are not considered fees. Hmmm. In any case, wherever the direct expenses are listed, the tax owed is the same.

How did Turbo Tax enhance their product to sell it as the eBay edition? All I could see was that they replaced some key words with eBay terms without adding any insight. They replaced the word “Your Business” with “Your eBay business”. EBay sellers use a lot of packing tape; I wish they had used tape in the example explaining COGS instead of crude oil.

This product was thrown together at the last minute, without enough research and input from those who sell on eBay for a living. After completing my return I realized it was $20 more than the edition I had been using! So much for saving me any money! Kudos to whoever thunk this up: you suckered me in good.