I originally contacted eBay's support team regarding this error in early February (with two additional follow-ups in March), but we still have customers report this same issue almost half a year later.
For listings where the shipping costs are manually added and invoiced by the Seller after a Buyer has committed to a purchase (a common format for items requiring LTL truck freight), Buyers that order multiples of an item will sometimes be shown grossly inflated totals, where that initial shipping rate (manually added by the Seller) has now been incorrectly multiplied by the item quantity.
A customer yesterday selected and purchased a quantity of (4) tires. We quoted them shipping at $182, which we then sent in an updated invoice with freight factored in at that exact amount. However, the rate displayed on their end when initially accessing this updated total listed freight as $728 (which is 4 x $182), and even recalculated their local sales tax based on the inflated shipping rate.
As far as I am aware, this only seems to occur if a customer accesses the updated order through eBay's bell-shaped notification icon, specifically by clicking the 'Pay Now' prompt for the order in the bell's dropdown menu. I don't believe it happens for all orders accessed this way (I attempted to reproduce it with my personal account in March to no avail), so it's likely there are other variables involved as well. Could be something related to how taxes are calculated in specific states or localities that breaks the system, but who knows. All I can say is it's obvious something, somewhere, in eBay's code is doing math it shouldn't be.
But the real kicker? If your Buyer proceeds from the screen displaying the incorrect total and continues with their payment, eBay will actually charge them that inflated amount. That's a major problem. Fortunately we've had just one customer get that far (they sped through checkout w/o realizing the difference), but it goes to show that this glitch isn't a mere inconvenience or a simple display error.
We've undoubtedly lost sales to this too, with more than a few people calling us sketchy or dishonest, accusing us of being intentionally misleading on the actual shipping rates. Most (but not all) of those I was able to recover after explaining the root cause of the problem and the work-around (eBay also emails the customer a copy of the invoice, and that always has the correct total), but those are just the customers that took the time to reach out. And while I'm sure the selling demographic directly affected by this is likely very small, this is technically a fairly jarring issue for those that do have to deal with it. After selling on eBay for well over a decade, it just gets to be frustrating how often a problem like this can go on for months unresolved — even when it's reported to them on numerous occasions...
