I maintain residences in multiple countries. I regularly shop on ebay and have items sent to different addresses depending on where I will be. By definition, there is only one default shipping address in my ebay profile. I know my situation is not a common edge case. I still believe this is a bug...
As an example, let's say my default shipping address is in germany but I bid on an item that I want shipped to my address in the US. The seller will ship internationally but has only quoted shipping for the USA which is what I want.
Case 1:
The auction closes and I am the winner. If I am faster than the seller... I can "pay now", select my US address and make payment with paypal due to the seller pre-specifying USA shipping. This is fine.
Case 2:
However if the seller "sends invoice/total" after auction close before I have a chance to pay... they will send the total based on my default shipping address which is Germany. So I get a total request for shipping the item to Germany (which I don't want). It also creates extra work for the seller since they have to calculate shipping for Germany which is unnecessary...but not sure how to avoid that in this situation.
After the seller sends the total, I go "pay now". My german address is preselected (which I don't want) and the seller calculated German shipping is provided. I change to my US address and instead of getting an updated total with the pre-specified US shipping from the auction, I get an error message saying that this seller (in the US) doesn't ship to the USA.
I have to switch to my US address and "request total from seller" again since according to ebay the seller didn't specify USA shipping costs. That's the bug. The seller did specify in the auction but the checkout process seems to forget this after the seller sends the total for a shipping address in a different country.
Requesting total again seems to be a problem because for many larger sellers, they don't seem to monitor their emails...especially for emails that look like routine notifications from ebay. I generally have to request multiple times and send contact requests that come through the "questions about an item" path so the seller is more likely to notice. Very inefficient.
I could change my default shipping address but am actively buying items to ship to germany at the same time and then would have the same issue with those items.
