eBay International Shipping to the USA & Its Territories
I have a few items for sale, but some are not available using EIS to USA, Puerto Rico, Marshall Islands, Virgin Islands etc. (any Domestic USPS shipping area)
What specific categories are blocked to ship to the USA? I don't believe any of my items fall under any restricted category. What is preventing them from being able to ship to USA? They all have proper Country of Origin. I've already talked to a eBay rep, and they couldn't help.
9 comments
marnotom!
·8 months agoThis issue has been discussed a fair bit on the eBay.ca community boards, @escstuff. The conclusion we’ve come to is that there are some items that even eIS just can’t ship to the US due to the elimination of the de minimis ($800 duty-free limit for personal imports sent by mail or courier).
Tariffs are based on an item’s country of origin or manufacture. In addition to an item’s country of origin, duties are also based on the country of the item’s materials, and quite often this information is unknown, especially with items such as clothing, which you seem to be selling. Since eIS can’t provide CBP with this information, items such as clothing are effectively unexportable to the United States through eIS.
Come visit the Canadian Seller Central
board! We’d love to hear from you, even if it’s a bad news story.
escstuff
OP8 months agoThanks for your answer. this is what I originally thought, but two items I am selling are in the same category.
A MLB jacket (Tigers) made in Canada can be exported to USA but a MLB (Blue Jays) team Jersey made in Canada cannot?
I understand with textiles/linen you need to also specify material. So this makes sense.
I think eBay just isn’t there 100% working properly with eIS to USA.
marnotom!
·8 months agoThere's likely a learning curve involved here. You sold that Blue Jays jersey back in October and checking the completed listing, it shows eIS shipping to the United States now. eIS shipping to the United States was probably disabled on that listing in October out of an abundance of caution. Remember, the program was practically a newborn in Canada at that time.
A significant number of complaints on the .ca discussion boards (and likely these ones, too) since the implementation of eIS on the .com site were from buyers who purchased from a listing where eIS was used only to find that the item's tracking dead-ended at the eIS hub in Illinois. These buyers often assumed that their item was lost or even stolen, but quite often a few questions about the item led to the suggestion that there was something about the item that made it risky or at least difficult to forward to its final destination with the information (or lack thereof) the hub had about it. Vintage items and items with lithium-ion batteries seemed to be the main victims.
I think eBay and Sincro (operators of the eIS hubs) are trying to cut down on these BBEs caused by forwarding through eIS, so they're using AI, bots, crawlers, or whatever, to go through listings to determine items' feasibility for forwarding, particularly to the United States which has become extremely difficult to export to on a small scale. Sometimes the AI will get it right, sometimes it won't. Just keep in mind that even if your listing shows that eIS will handle the item, there's a chance that item may not make it past the Canadian hub to its final destination if it's determined at that point that it would be problematic to forward it.
escstuff
OP8 months agoThe two example items are active BIN listings; one is available in the USA and the other is not. One is a jacket, and the other is a jersey, and both are listed in the same category.
The only difference I can come up with is that the MLB jersey is a "Youth" size, which may be flagged for some reason as being Children's Clothing which would be subject to additional U.S. scrutiny due to safety measures.
There’s absolutely no feedback from eBay. If they’re using AI and can’t explain why it flagged the item, then that’s a real problem. I’d assume that if you make a sale with eIS, they tell you to ship it, and then they can’t fulfill the order, at that point it’s eBay’s problem, right?
marnotom!
·8 months agoWhich is what I was talking about in my previous post. It's likely something that eBay is trying to avoid as much as possible now as shipments that end at the hub seem to irk many buyers to no end and costs eBay future sales in addition to money.
For what it's worth, I was trying to help another Canadian seller last week and was looking for an item listed on .com with eIS that was similar to what they were selling. I found a vintage Casio watch being sold by a rare example of a US seller that was using their own shipping method in addition to eIS for their international sales, and it's probably just as well that they were. Even though the list of countries the US eIS ships to is far more extensive than the list for Canadian eIS, it wasn't a shipping method for many countries that I checked. South America seemed to be out of the picture, as well as the African countries on the list, for starters. In addition, many European countries were bafflingly excluded, such as Austria. Not sure if the AI was going amuck with those.
krazzykats
·8 months agoeBay International Shipping on eBay
I’m assuming your items are with you in Canada, so they wouldn’t qualify for EIS....
á“šá˜á—¢
escstuff
OP8 months agoTrue, but eIS is available for Canadian sellers now. I’m approved for that program.
1786davycrockett
·8 months ago@escstuff
Since you are in Canada, does Canada have any restrictions on selling those items to the USA and American territories?
escstuff
OP8 months agoCanada does have some restrictions, but my items shouldn’t apply.