eBay items on Google with “Free Shipping”

Martin is an experienced eBay sellers with eight years experience of selling on the site, but he’s increasingly coming up against a shipping issue which is out of his control.

He uses the “Freight” shipping option which enable him to specify shipping costs in the listing description. That’s not unusual for many sellers of heavy items, although it’s not the most desirable shipping price solution. The reason he pretty much has to do it is on many of his listings is that his products are heavy pallet deliveries and the cost varies wildly across the country – The alternative would be to put prices up for many buyers who currently enjoy lower the lower shipping costs he offers.

eBay are doing their best to help him sell, heavily promoting his products with Google adverts. The problem is by the time Martin’s listing appears on Google eBay have switched his “” shipping option to read “Free Shipping”.

Lately he’s getting an increased number of irate customers who have clicked the “Free Shipping” advert on Google and then demanding that he ship the items for free.

We’re not sure quite how to fix this one here at Tamebay head office. If you’ve got any bright ideas let us know, although I suspect it’s a tweak that eBay would need to make for listings with “Freight” shipping options in their product feed to Google.

I should emphasise that neither we nor Martin are complaining about eBay investing heavily in Google advertising to send us traffic to our eBay listings, in fact that’s exactly why so many sellers have been happy to pay their eBay fees over the years. It’s just a pain when the information isn’t quite right.