International shipping combining items & LOST SALES & Irritated Buyers

[quicksilverdiecast]

I am getting more than a little irritated with ebay and its stupidity. I sell many items and there are many international buyers whom with I deal with sales wise, HOWEVER due to ebay not having a clue, nor apparently letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing is costing a considerable amount of LOST sales and very poor customer service. 1st off they fail to direct or even give guidance to buyers (USA) at using their cart system, this result in USA customers being overcharged on shipping (NO I am NOT going to offer free shipping as that is a farce because the carriers are always changing rates, which results in a seller who offers free shipping to either a swallow the loss or be go thru and change his prices on products to reflect the latest carriers rates (as we all know shipping is NOT free, it simply is padded into the items cost). Now onto international shipping of items that need to be combined, it seems like EVERYDAY this problem pops up where a good international buyer want to buy many items and have it combined into one parcel, well apparently someone smarter than I thought it would be a good idea to block me from combining the items into a reasonable shipping solution and insists on the buyer paying shipping on each item, which get expensive quick!!!! They put the items they want into the cart form a new combined total and guess what ebay blocks them too, now at this point both buyer and seller are starting to get **bleep**, I tell them to call ebay and have them fix their account so they can complete the transaction(this is a hit or miss solution) when it comes to a stand off where the buyer cannot nor the seller cannot they get MAD and say forget it and cancel the sales (LOST SALES- POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE) and then who do they blame????the seller.....SO I have developed a work around to ebay red tape and instruct the buyer to give me the item numbers and quantity of each item and create a new package deal listing just for them with everything in one parcel with reasonable shipping (Global shipping system is the only international shipping option I offer) and this works well and creates sales and happy customers.....yet it cost me time in going back and forth with buyers and time to generate the new listing, as well as cancelling the previous item they already committed to and would not pay multiple shipping costs....so tell me oh great ebay wizards exactly what the problem is and do NOT give the the **bleep** line about import duties etc., as their is no problems offering package deals in one listing, yet when trying to combine items from when the customers have picked out the items and committed to them but refuse to pay for each item by itself (shipping wise). Then I have sales where an international buyer has managed to combine the items himself into one parcel! STOP THE LUNACY and STOP blocking buyers from being able to combine items for the international buyers....you always preach about give the customers an good buying experience....not to mention loss of sales on my end and giving me the seller a bad name because of you!  

[pjcdn2005]

@lacemaker3 

As I said in earlier posts, I'm fairly certain that it is not possible for a seller to send a combined invoice for a gsp transaction.  In your first screenshot you were obviously able to click on request total but I don't know if that is always possible for an international buyer or if you were able to because at that point the item is going to a US address since the shipping is method showing as USPS Priority.  Even if it is possible for a gsp buyer to get to that page in the second screen shot, I don't see any option for requesting an invoice. If you look at the very bottom there is a link to send seller a message but not to request an invoice.  I'm assuming that send a message actually means that the buyer is simply sending a message, not requesting an invoice.  

 Since we have seen someone on the boards lately who works with the gsp I'll ask him to confirm.

@jfgambit  

1. It's my understanding that a buyer cannot request an invoice for a gsp sale so that the seller can combine the domestic shipping costs. Is that correct?  If it is correct, could you please explain why it does work that way.

2.  I've been told but want to confirm as I'm not 100% sure is that even if a seller has combined shipping rules set up for their US buyers, those rules will not be used for a gsp buyer for the domestic portion of the trip.  So if the seller has a shipping cost of $5 for the first item and $2 for each other item, the domestic buyer would pay $7 shipping but the gsp buyer would pay $5 shipping for each item for a total of $10 because the gsp ignores the domestic rules.   If that is true, why can it not be set up so that if a seller has set up their shipping to combine automatically,  a gsp buyer can't pay that same shipping cost to Kentucky as a domestic buyer would.

[lacemaker3]

@pjcdn2005, sorry, but the screenshots I posted show that your understanding (which was the same as mine until I checked into it) is not correct. I would have said the same thing, until I decided to check and found out that it was possible to do Request Total.

I didn't actually do the Request Total for those items, because that would have purchased the items, and I didn't want to do that.

However, in my experience, as long as the Request Total link is there, it has always worked for me when I clicked it. Sometimes the Request Total isn't there at all, but it was there on both the pages that I showed screenshots for. I outlined it in red, at the top right, just to the left of the price summary box.

I had a Canadian address for shipping to in both of those screenshots. The reason that USPS Priority Mail was showing on the first one, was that I was on eBay USA ebay.com website. So it was showing the domestic shipping in spite of the fact that my primary shipping address was in Canada. That's just what it does. When I went to the Checkout page from that page, it was showing the GSP shipping to my Canadian address, as I showed in the last screenshot in that post.

For the second one, the GSP shipping is showing because I was on the eBay Canada website en.ebay.ca. In that case, it shows the international shipping option which was GSP.

As I said, the checkout page was automatically combining the costs for the international shipping, and the import charges, because they were less when I had 2 items in the cart, than the total of the costs when the 2 items were in my cart individually.

It used to be for a GSP transaction, if the seller sent an invoice, that would take the transaction out of the GSP shipping program. That was true a long time ago, but I don't know if it still is, or if things have changed. I couldn't experiment with that, without making purchases that I didn't want, so I couldn't check that.

There wasn't any "Request invoice" link on those pages. Just the "Request Total" link. I'm not sure if they're the same thing or not.

[lacemaker3]

I repeated the process I went through to get the "Request Total" screenshot while on eBay USA, and it does (now) show the GSP shipping to Canada.

The other day, I had just changed my primary shipping address to the Canada address, and I guess that the webpage was lagging a bit, and was still working with the old Primary shipping address as the default, so it showed USA shipping.

However, when I repeated the process just now, it does show the GSP shipping and import charges on that page, and the "Request Total" link is still there, an active link, which I have highlighted in red. 

So, it is possible for buyers to request total when they have multlple items in their cart that are being shipped by GSP, and they can do this on both eBay USA and eBay Canada.

It is still combining these into one GSP order, because the Mustang wouldn't have any Import Charges if it were being purchased separately, it's below the price threshold for Import Charges. It only has Import Charges here because the total price for both is over the limit. I deliberately chose one lower-priced item to check that.

This time, only the lower priced Mustang is in the cart. There are no Import Charges, and the Request Total link is grayed out (inactive) because there's only one item.

And, this is just the F250, which does have Import Charges. The total costs for these two cars, purchased separately, is US $ 32.75 + US $ 70.59 = US $103.34, which higher than the amount shown above when they are purchased together, which is US $ 91.23.

[lacemaker3]

I realized that I could safely check the Request Total link, and it does work. I didn't send it of course, but the Buy and Submit Request button is active.

[funfir_14]

I have also had this issue. This last time, the buyer wants 5 comic books and he was able to request a total but on my end I can only see one book and it won't let him request a total for the other books.  I tried to at least take off the shipping for the one book but it won't let me.  In this case, the buyer is in Europe. Not sure if that makes any difference but it looks like I'll have to do a package deal. It's the only way.