Earlier on, Marcia did in fact admit (either via 
e-mail to customers or directly on the auctions, 
I forgot) that this fee was supposed to cover the 
new PayPal charges for business accounts.  But 
after PayPal forbade businesses to charge bidders 
these PayPal fees, it seems that Anime Assault 
has been disguising the $2.50 as a handling fee.

This is pretty unethical on several grounds.  
First, even bidders NOT paying via PayPal are 
being charged this fee, and I'm ultimately 
guessing that Anime Assault is keeping the 
surplus as profits.  Secondly, it's against 
PayPal policy, like I mentioned.  Finally, this 
fee has nothing to do with the handling, as I 
mentioned above.

[MY ADVICE #2 TO MARCIA]

Don't be try to sly about it.  If you want to 
charge $2.50 for every auction, then simply 
increase the starting bid for each auction by 
that much.  Instead of a $5 starting bid, make it 
$7.50, and do away with the controversy.

If folks still want a cel for $7.50 or higher 
(which is always more likely to happen than not), 
then you lose NOTHING and probably would receive 
a lot less hassle for folks like us.

If you continue to persist with listing this 
separate fee, I would be very disappointed.  
Because the only reason someone would do this is 
(1) they want to take advantage of bidders who 
might not remember or note the $2.50 fee until 
after the auctions; and (2) they are charging 
folks for fees that they are not supposed to be 
paying for.

I would ask you, Marcia, to seriously consider 
this suggestion.

ABOUT THE BACKGROUNDS:

Most of the backgrounds for prop_lady auctions 
are in fact non-matching (many times, it's 
painfully obvious) but it took some e-mails and 
protest on this forum before Marcia finally 
decided to place her disclaimer ["I do not know 
if it's matching"] on all her auctions.  That 
might have been 1-2 years after she already began 
selling on E-Bay.  That meant that a lot of 
bidders (many simply not knowledgeable enough) 
got tricked into thinking they were paying for 
matching backgrounds.

Even now, many don't know this fact and if the 
background blends with the cel well enough, and 
they still might bid believing that they are 
paying for the authentic matching background 
along with the cel.  This is unfortunate.

However, I don't think Marcia is to be blamed for 
anything here, really (except maybe trying to 
hide this fact in order to boost sales).  I truly 
believe that the majority of the time, Anime 
Assault doesn't know if the backgrounds match the 
cels.  In fact, many times, they can't even 
identify the anime title where a cel comes from.  
I just chalk it up to their general lack of anime 
knowledge.