Changes in the way postage costs are set when listing have been made for local collection. My take on this is that it has been done to split “Collection in person”, from postage and courier rates, to prevent gaming Best Match. The options are shown here as presented in TurboLister. Unfortunately the way that it has been implemented means that if you offer “Collection in person” as a free option it will not be displayed in your listings.
This is the screen shot for a listing with a single postage option of local collection offered with £0.00 entered as the cost.
Buyers are presented with a message to check the item description or to contact the seller to check actual postage costs. This destroys the use of local collection as it implies the seller will actually be able to deliver the item, which may simply not be possible for heavy or bulky items.
The only way to display local collection as a delivery option is to charge buyers for the privilege of collecting their purchase.
I tested offering a paid delivery service such as Royal Mail or Parcel Force in conjunction with free collection and again unless a charge is made the “Collection in Person” option will not be displayed on eBay informing buyers that it’s an option.
It’s ludicrous that sellers can’t allow buyers to collect items without imposing a charge. Sure some sellers do have collection charges, but the vast majority, that offer collection, offer free collection. From now on if sellers want to inform buyers that collection is an option they’ll be forced to charge at least £0.01 to indicate that collection is available.
4 Responses
This is just crazy. Together with the “must offer PayPal” rule, it’s going to be very difficult in future to offer collection only items on eBay. People would do a lot better offering them on Gumtree from now on, I think.
You know what…. I’ve another massively heavy printer to list and you’re right – I’m gonna stick it on Gumtree with free collection instead of eBay where I have to charge a customer to collect!
Spending almost an hour trying to figure out why I couldn’t list with collection and get it to show wasn’t a good use of my time 🙁
I’ve just tried this myself through Turbo Lister, and got the same “Please contact seller” message as a postage cost, but when I listed again through the SYI form, “Will arrange for local pick up only (no postage).” was displayed instead.
When I revised the listing created by TL, the error was corrected, and local pick up was displayed.
Looks like a problem with Turbo Lister. For a change…. 🙄
Oh nice one Steve, it is a TL error, revising works just fine.
It appears that TL can’t handle a £0.00 in that field… Grrrrrr 👿