Correction to my earlier post on adding GSP shipping in last 24 hours of auction.

[argy_eyes]

Experts,

I was mistaken when I said I had neglected to enable GSP in the listing. I looked at it again, and though it is greyed out, the check mark is there for GSP.

The correct description of the problem is this: GSP is enabled in the listing but when you go to the Shipping tab and attempt to change the country, only the "United States" option appears. The list of excluded locations shows only the ones that are always excluded for GSP.  And an examination of the bidder list shows two previous bids from outside the USA.

I am beginning to think that this is correlated to the "Thursday night" phenomenon.  Even replying to the message that started all this generated a weird error page. I'm going to try everything again in the morning.

Mike

[lacemaker3]

@argy_eyes ,

I looked at all three of your listings, including the auction, and none of them have GSP shipping available. They have no international shipping at all, just to the USA.

Perhaps vintage cameras and equipment are being restricted for GSP shipping at the moment? They don't usually make announcements about this, but we have heard before (from sellers who ran into the problem) that things like guitars and car parts get restricted from GSP shipping. With the guitars, it turned out to be because they often include rosewood, which was put on the endangered species list. With the car parts, I suspect it was because of possible fuel or other hazardous fluids.

Another thing you could check is to make sure that you don't have an account-wide setting that restricts shipping to the USA only. That might be over-riding the setting when you try to change it on a specific listing.

At any rate, if the GSP shipping is not on the listing when it is live, there's no way to add it after the listing ends.

Personally, I have experienced very slow shipping on international purchases during the pandemic, GSP included. One of my purchases was lost completely after it reached the USPS. So I would probably not take the risk of sending high-end pieces like that international, at the moment. But it's your choice of course.

[lacemaker3]

@argy_eyes ,

I can't check on the auction listing, but I checked on one of your fixed-price listings, and I can't purchase it using a foreign address. It requires me to change the address to a location where the seller will ship. So you do have the block enabled for bidders whose primary shipping address is not in the regions you ship to.

If the auction is set up the same way, then your "foreign" bidders have to be using a primary shipping address that is in the USA, probably a freight forwarding company. Your bidder from Russia could do the same thing.

[argy_eyes]

@lacemaker3 

LM3, 

Thanks for your observations and suggestions. I followed up on each of them. Turns out the issue is another eBay "glitch." After talking to a technical rep for 10 minutes I learned that some GSP auctions (for the last month) have been displaying only "United States" as a destination. They are "working on it." 

There was no way the rep could hack the listing to make GSP work.  He confirmed, as you mentioned, that GSP cannot be added to a completed auction.

The current solution is to terminate the auction. I wrote to the affected bidders (in Russia and England) and suggested that best thing to do was to find another listing, one for which GSP worked.

Regards,

Mike