I've vetted out this IPR added thing that everyone's talking about.
So I use SixBit which is listing software. I don't suffer the ailement of having Best Offer added to my listings. The tool is pretty advanced (think of Turbolister). Well IPR is not selected on any of my listings.
So after some reading here, I started checking my listings. It's random. I listed a bunch of elongated cents a few months ago and when checking these listings, some have IPR, some dont. I went into a listing that had the IPR to "edit the listing" and I found out what everyone's been posting is true, it's unchecked, and you can't make the eBay forced IPR go away.
They don't realize by adding IPR to our listings that buyers can't use the shopping cart, because if you are required an immediate payment to get the item, you can't commit to buy with it in your cart and pay later. Now I'm understanding what my customers are complaining about. Customers don't like complications and problems. They want it to be simple, put it in the cart, request a total, and pay an invoice.
It's a 50/50 shot of whether or not a buyer will abandon my listings and go buy elsewhere, or if I'm lucky, what I have is a good enough price, they are a repeat buyer and trust me, or they can't find it elsewhere, in which case I get a payment for multiple shipping charges.
How I've attempted to fix this is with the Markdown Manager Shipping Discount, when you buy two or more, the flat rate shipping is $4.35, so whatever you put in your cart, you will be invoiced $4.35 on checkout. This works only for domestic shipping (I wouldn't be daring enough to try such a thing with International shipments).
The limit on "individually selected items" is 500, so I put three promos. One for all coins I'm willing to stuff in an envelope for $4.35 (keeping in mind some customers buy 10 or more at a time). Another promo on Trade Dollars (my customers who buy them only collect those), and the third promo is for every other type of token in the store. I rarely sell multiples in other tokens, but things like German Emergency Money, Elongated Cents, Encased Cents and some types of medallions are desired in small groups instead of singles.
This promo thing seems to work well, but every time I add new listings I need to add them into the promo. Something that wouldn't be necessary if that cart worked well for customers and sellers.
Now here's the two bit question I wish someone at eBay could answer... what are they thinking by forcing immediate payment when they are giving us the option to NOT have that on our listings? Do they not realize if my customers can't buy my items via the cart, they might not bother with eBay because it's too much trouble. eBay's bottom line is being effected by all these ludicrious changes they keep making.
Cheers, C.
