About 1 month ago I had a customer email me stating that they were trying to buy a conveyor I had for sale but when they hit the "Commit to Buy" button they received a message that said"this seller does not ship to your location. Please look for sellers that will ship to you." I thought at first that maybe I had made a mistake on my shipping policy, but quickly found out that all my items that required freight shipping were sending all my customers the same message. Furthermore, it wouldn't allow the customer to checkout even they were willing to arrange their own shipment!!! Many of our items, or at least high ticket items, require freight shipping, and I had noticed my sales had dropped off. After I finished checking my listings, I started checking other sellers that sold similar items that would require freight shipping and they had the same problem. They probably didn't even know it.
I called eBay and they were aware of the "bug" in the system, and said at the time it was on the list but not a priority. After calling every week since then, I am being told it has moved up the priority list but still no fix. The eBay support team as usual were very nice and helpful, and I have no doubt they are checking into this. The only thing I can't understand is why eBay is having such a difficult time fixing this issue? I usually choose my own "Freight Shipping" option because as an item sells, I have to contact the customer, get their zip code, get a quote to their location from our freight broker, then add the shipping to the eBay invoice, and then send it to the customer to pay. It's not like there are complicated freight calculators, algorithms computing transit times, NMFC numbers, Freight Class Numbers, etc????? All it needs to do is allow the customer to "commit to buy" and then allow me to enter the shipping cost. Period. Then I can send the invoice to the customer.
I just concerns me that it has taken so long and still is not fixed. I've been selling on eBay for over 10 years and have had slumps in sales (usually after Spring and Fall Seller Updates) but I can't say I have ever experienced a technical glitch that has taken over a month to fix. The other part that concerned me about this, was that not only were my customers restricted from buying my items, but under the message it show pictures of similar items for my customer to go to other sellers stores instead of saying something like "Send this seller a message to see if a shipping option can be worked out".
My temporary fix for this was to set all my freight items to "Local Pickup Only" which still turns off some buyers, but hopefully they will read further down in my listings stating that we have no problem shipping freight items. Heck, if I could get a sale I'd figure out a way to ship the thing to the moon if requested!!! LOL!!! The problem with "Local Pickup Only" is I still have to go back and charge the customer separately for the shipping.
Anyone reading this may want to test their checkout process if you use freight shipping. If anyone else is having this problem, let me know. I'd like to see what you are being told about a fix. Hopefully if enough people call about this it will get fixed sooner rather than later.
