Buyers forced to pay immediately rather than add multiple items to cart.

[stetbooks]

I'm having a problem that might be particular to the Everything Else | Mature Audiences | DVD category (I hope not!) that's causing me to lose sales to good, regular customers.

About 2 weeks ago I started getting complaints that they could not add multiple DVDs to their cart and then get combined shipping. eBay was requiring them to pay for each DVD one at a time, which leads to a lot of (thankfully) patient regular customers who are willing to WAY over-pay for shipping, and then I send them a refund for the overpayment at time of shipping.  

But I'm afraid any new customers might not be that trusting of my customer service, or simply not have that much $ to have to over-pay and then wait for a refund. That means I'm losing sales!

For reference, the shipping charges are:

1 DVD = $4.95

2DVD = $6.45

3DVD = $7.95

4DVD = $9.45

5 or more DVD = $10.96

or they can choose any number of DVDs by Priority Mail for $15 (this is assuming somebody is getting many titles and wants them faster than Media Mail.

So right now, if somebody orders 4 DVDs, instead of being able to request an invoice and me changing that shipping to $9.45, they have to buy 4 individual purchases at $4.95 each (for a total shipping of  $19.80.) I end up with a potentially angry customer, and I have to refund them $10.35 in shipping.  

It's turning into a nightmare!

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Of note: this isn't a problem with auctions because all my auctions close on the same day at the same time, so I can send the invoices out immediately at closing, with the titles combined, and the correct regular shipping.

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The first idea from ebay was that this might be a device-particular problem especially with customers using mobile devices. I've ad customers do mobile, and traditional browsers on PCs and Macs: same problems, so the platform isn't a difference here.

And it's not a problem with Paypal that I can see because they all pay me via PayPal and that's how I do the refunds. 

It's getting worse as the sales traffic gets higher going into the Holiday crunch, and I'm not sure what else to do to get this fixed for them. As it stands, I'm losing potential sales because the checkout doesn't work the way it's supposed to, and I *hope* it's not particular to this product category. I lose sales, eBay loses comissions, and I can't see any business reason for eBay to restrict multiple item orders in this category. But I've seen a lot of strange rules come and go over the years for the Mature Audience category.

(Any other combined shipping rule is handled by a business promotion, but the Promotionsl Manager in eBay isn't complicated enough to set up a list this complex.)