Cannot mark items as "shipped".

[railfanslides]

Yesterday afternoon I gave a partial refund on items for 2 different buyers for combined shipping. Now I am unable to mark these items as shipped, there is no button for me to do so!  Now I am afraid I will get these marked against me as late shipments.  And these are items which just go by first class mail, so I cannot add a tracking #.  Anybody have any ideas?  All of my other paid orders I am able to mark "shipped" as usual.

[dhbookds]

Not sure what you mean by "which just go by first class mail, so I cannot add a tracking #".......first class has tracking so you should be able to add the #.

But Ebay does updates on Thurs nite, and if that's when you tried, that may be the problem........things go wonky then.  Try this morn and see if it works.

[1tuna]

I never mark items as shipped.I use ebay shipping so it does it for me

if I use paypal shipnow for a problem order then I just add tracking

maybe you should be sending partial shipping refunds after you ship..................not before

[jayjaspersgarage]

Generally I will do the extra work you describe in manually combining when a customer doesn't know how to send a simple request for an invoice before they pay.  I just weight all three items or whatever the total is and ship the first item using that weight.  Then I go to "Paid and shipped" items to manually mark the other items and add the racking number.  This has worked for ten years.  

Sometimes on the same day one customer magically can combine fifteen items while another customer will pay for four separate items and pay 4X shipping and handling.   On a rare occasion a customer will email me for help because the ebay software does not work and gives them no option to ask for a combined invoice.  I have more sympathy for those customers rather than the ones who write two weeks later about not getting combined shipping when they never asked for it or emailed to let us know they needed help.

[railfanslides]

I can't add a tracking number because it goes out in an envelope with a 55 cent first class stamp.... there is no tracking.  

90% of my sales mail out in a first class #10 envelope. I have to mark each one as shipped, manually.

Anyhow, by this morning it was all resolved so I was able to mark as shipped.

[ittybitnot]

 in manually combining when a customer doesn't know how to send a simple request for an invoice before they pay.  

@jayjaspersgarage 

FWIW, I am a buyer and know how to request an invoice.  Most times it does not work, as the "request total" button is grayed out.  Yes, one can "check out" with items in the cart, but eBay charges full shipping on each item.   An error message "This seller does not combine shipping" often appears even if the seller does combine shipping. 

This has been an issue for a few years now ever since eBay removed the "commit to buy and continue shopping with this seller" option, and went to the unpublicized 'immediate payment required' for items under $1k even though the seller did not select this. 

Thus we have sellers that do combine and send partial refunds when combining items after the fact.  eBay keeps all the original fees. 

There are numerous other reasons why an invoice cannot be requested. Just to name a couple:

If any of the items were "on sale"
If the items are of a different shipping class

If some of the items are auction wins combined with fixed price

[1tuna]

I am happy you were able to get it resolved

I never thought about the fact that if tracking is not used they still have to be marked as shipped

whenever I have a similar problem I try a different browser and sometimes it goes thru

[jayjaspersgarage]

"90% of my sales mail out in a first class #10 envelope. "

It is impressive that you have 100% feedback while not using tracking much.  I may switch to using a stamp and four day handling and risk losing my TRS status.

[jayjaspersgarage]

"FWIW, I am a buyer and know how to request an invoice.  Most times it does not work, as the "request total" button is grayed out. "

Just another ebay glitch that can ruin a sellers' TRS status and cause sellers a lot of extra time fixing something that should never happen. 

FWIW.   lol  I had to think about that acronym for a second.

[railfanslides]

@ jayjasper, all of my buyers are train slide collectors. I have 2 different stores selling slides, the other is trainslidecentral.  These are a serious bunch of guys, and the 2 times things have gotten lost in the mail in the last 2+ years, they have understood the USPS is not perfect. I refunded them the $$ when that happened, I know they were not just making it up.  I only ship with tracking if the sale is over $40 or more than 6 slides. 

[iopen]

I had this problem when I had several orders to mark as shipped at the same time and it didn't let me do it. So I marked them one at a time and it worked.
I also use first class stamps because otherwise the postage for a parcel with tracking would cost more than my small light weight items are worth. Not had any problems with customers claiming they didn't receive it. 

Works especially well for international first class letters, I can send an ounce for $1.30 which might cost $10 as a tracked parcel. 

[kh-jean]

Hi everyone,

Due to the age of this thread, it has been closed to further replies. Please feel free to start a new thread if you wish to continue to discuss this topic.

Thank you for understanding.