eBay invoiced customer combined shipping on two 65" TVs when no combined shipping was offered.
We used eBay's calculated shipping so that our customers are getting discounted rates and we setup shipping business policies that have Combined Shipping Rule set to None. But for some reason, eBay invoices the customer a discounted cost to ship when multiples are bought of the same listing. For instance, a customer just recently bought two 65" TVs and instead of charging the customer double the shipping price of one TV, they were charged a little bit more a shipping price of a single TV and we had to eat the shipping of ~$300+ on the second TV.
Is the only way to make sure customers are paying the full amount of shipping for each item that cannot be shipped together, but when bought from the same listing, is to have the items listed with a Flat shipping policy?
wastingtime101
·11 months agoCan you post some screenshots of your shipping setup on the listing and your shipping policy tied to that listing?
nps
OP11 months agoHere is the shipping setup on that listing.
and here is the shipping business policy connected to it.
The dimensions in the listing are too large to combine and together would fall outside the maximum dimension allowed for Ground shipping. It would be nice if eBay's calculated shipping rules were more sophisticated that just combining the weights on multiple items purchased from a single fixed price listing and would also take dimensions into account. The listing notifies the buyer to contact the seller when combined weight exceeds 150 lbs. so why not have it do the same when dimensions exceed the maximum?
wastingtime101
·11 months agoDo you sell a lot of items like this? If you do, you may want to set up rate tables for those items. It's flat ship, but you create your own zones so you can charge different rates to NY, Chicago, LA, etc. It's a pain though because you have to update it whenever there are rate changes.
Another option is to keep a quantity of 1 on the listing even if you have more then 1, then restock the quantity after it sells to prevent a buyer from purchasing more than one at a time.
One of those 2 methods will probably be your best bet.
Flat or free ship is another option and I understand why you wouldn't want to do that here.
There's a setting under buyer requirements to limit the number of items a buyer can purchase in a 10 day window. Some sellers use it for the purpose of avoiding combined ship on large items. It's limited to being an account setting, unfortunately. It would be better if you could set it up at the listing level.
eBay's system has a lot of limitations, including assuming same box size no matter how many items are purchased.
It's been a while since I set up calc ship on multi quantity listings without the combined shipping discount so I couldn't remember off the top of my head if the system would combine multiples of the same item. Your screenshots helped refresh my memory that it will combine the same SKU, but will not combine multi-SKUs without a combined ship rule.
I wish I had a better option for you, but what's outlined above is pretty much what you have to work with.
If you have questions about any of those settings feel free to ping me on a reply and I'll help.
You can hit the ? icon on the bottom right corner of most eBay pages then hit the "send feedback" link regarding this problem. Include a link to this thread with your feedback.
nps
OP11 months agoThanks for your suggestions. I went with calculated shipping for the exact reason you stated above. It was too time consuming to keep checking and adjusting my rate tables for flat shipping. I had flat shipping for quite a while, but it took a lot of work to make sure we were not running a large shipping cost deficit because my tables would not take into account item size which would sometimes result in large package surcharges. Using the calculated shipping method would get us the most accurate shipping amounts collected from the customers.
We do free shipping sometimes, but it is mostly used on smaller items.
I am thinking that my only option right now to avoid eBay combining shipping on these larger item SKUs like the commercial signage TVs that sometimes sell in quantities greater than one, will be to add an average cost to ship to the sale price and go with the "free" shipping.
If eBay would change the method of calculating shipping, my first preference would be for eBay to consider the dimensions the seller inputs on individual SKUs for calculated shipping and add them together and when the final dimensions exceeds the maximum allowed by UPS or FedEx, then just multiply the cost of shipping a single unit by the number of units bought so the seller can ship units individually. my second preference would be to have the option at the listing level to let the seller check a box that will charge customers who buy more than one the same shipping cost of buying one multiplied by the number bought.
I know! This is wishful thinking because this issue doesn't affect many sellers. It just doesn't seem like it would be really that complicated to do on their end.