refunding money for shipping on bundled items

[ddevartstore]

Hi,

I have a buyer who buys multiple items . He pays right awy, but I want to charge him for the actual shipping costs rather than the shipping charges he's paid for (which are significantly more.

I resolved this last time by issuing him a partial refund, but that seems to confuse ebay, which  treats this something like  as a problem issue with returned items rather than shipping costs reduced. 

I was wondering - is there an easier way to do this, so that he doesn't have to pay the extra shipping up front? Or is there a mechanism for refunding just for shipping?

Thanks in advance.

[wooden_flower · Accepted solution]

How fun to have a repeat buyer 🙂

You can turn on combined payments - then he could put the items in his cart and ask you for a total. Then he would pay the reduced shipping up front and you would not have to refund.

To turn on combined payments -

1. On the Manage shipping settings - opens in new window or tab page, select Edit beside Allow combined payments and shipping.
2. Choose the time period during which you're willing to combine payment for purchased items and select Save.  3 days is good unless you are going to run auctions and want to give your buyers longer to pay.

If you wait and refund after you ship, eBay should not see the refund as a problem - lots of shipping refunds are processed.  Be sure to use bulk shipping when you ship, so that you get the tracking # loaded on all of his purchases, and then they are all marked shipped.  https://gslblui.ebay.com/gslblui/bulk

If the item isn't marked as shipped, it might be causing the system to think there is a problem.

[ddevartstore]

Thank you so much!

I did do one refund and it seems ebay regarded it as my refunding parts of the costs of the items. They didn't really seem to have a mechanism to show it was just shipping costs being refunded. I'm about to do another refund to a buyer, but from her eon i'll be dealing with that by adjusting on their invoice .