eBay has announced today that it’s opening local sites in three new countries: Finland, Hungary and Portugal. It says that this will offer local language sites to an additional 25 million people.
Buyers will be “directed to” (I think that means, able to see) items from eBay UK which are available for delivery to their country. To show up in those listings, sellers must:
- be offering fixed price items
- be offering worldwide postage with specified postage costs
- be PayPal verified and offering PayPal as a payment option.
eBay say that auto parts, fashion and consumer electronics are likely to be particularly popular, as they have proved to be with the European sites which were launched earlier this year.
7 Responses
I welcome this eBay ‘expansion’.
I sell to buyers in most European Countries from time to time and exposure with some local language support is most welcome.
There are some differences in the way that listings display on the ‘International’ sites. If you hope for some sales you might just want to check out exactly how your listings appear.
There are a number of issues that remain to be sorted out.
By far the most important of these is the shipping charge.
In search results European buyers are seeing (for UK sellers items at least) UK domestic rather than European shipping charges.
It is not until a listing page is viewed that the correct Country (European) rate is displayed. Could easily result in potential buyers reacting badly.
I first told eBay about this back in March. They either do not understand or regard it as not important.
I will tell them again.
uk customs adding vat to a returned item and parcelforce shafting us for a £13 quid handling charge on a
customer return is our biggest headache
and then just to keep your interest up in shipping to strange eastern european buyers, is the encouraging communication of
Hi ! I want inform You, I will pay You all the money , but not via pay pal, but via Western Union. Please give me your private address to do it
Indded, if for instance a customer from France left poor dsr’s for a product advertised on UK site the these would not count.
But beware, Ebay can also use its own ‘global’ count in assessing your performance as they see it.
Thus your ratings may appear perfect on UK console, but if you’d been unlucky enough to pick up a few bad uns from overseas customers, you could find yourself with a listing restiction.
Also this is not a hypotheitcal situation, so take note now.