I came across an interesting eBay glitch today when talking to Mark Townsend, a seller of . It appears that a lot of his postage rates are missing for International Destinations.
I say “missing” but that’s not quite true, they’re simply not being displayed on eBay.co.uk, but if you view the very same item on eBay.com they magically appear. Also if you actually purchase a pair of the Earphones, when you come to pay the correct postage rates are displayed for every location you could ever wish to have them posted to.
In itself this is a bit of a minor glitch, however it’s causing some major headaches for Mark as potential customers contact him to ask just how much carriage will cost. Doubtless he’s also losing a number of sales from overseas customer who simply don’t bother buying because they don’t know the delivery costs.
It’s a partially random glitch as whilst some EU destinations such as Poland do display, many hundreds of others don’t. Mark has also experimented by adding additional International Postage options such as International Signed For, the new options do show up but the pre-existing options are still missing.
Have a check of your own listings and see if you can see postage for different destinations. Are you also missing out on sales because your customer don’t know what delivery will cost and are uncertain if you’re even willing to ship to them in the first place?
18:40 25/1/13 Edited to add: You know how sometimes your day starts off bad and just carries on getting worse? That appears to be the case with the International shipping glitch. Now it appears that instead of simply not displaying the postage set by the seller, if you happen to be in Spain the postage is displayed as “Gratis”. IN case of any doubt Gratis does of course mean Free.
We’ve seen the same for items viewed from the US, and Turkey, Free Postage for items where the specified postage is set but simply doesn’t show. It’s one thing not to show postage, it’s quite another to tell buyers it’s free 🙁
8 Responses
Yes I have seen that, they also have a gitche this week on multi-variations that are out of stock in a particular variation showing you need to buy -1… …they are working on fixing it.
We have had the glitch on international postage for the last few days, eBay said they are working on it!
We have had this problem all last week, I thought it might have been our multi-channel provider but now I can chase eBay to reply to my emails about this problem.
It has definitely effected our overseas sales.
Some of mine seemed wrong this morning, having a day of work ahead of me I thought I’ll sort this out this afternoon when I have time. When I looked again this afternoon all OK, but some of my items with multiples seemed to be suggesting that if you bought another one the postage was ‘free’. Dunno if this is part of the same glitch or something else….
Because of this “minor glitch” we have now lost 99% of our international sales, which was about 30% of our total sales. We do not even get many questions asking for the cost. I would not ask, if there is plenty other listings to choose from.
Flip – we have just unblocked italy, added postage table rates, and then gone to bulk edit all our listings to account for the signed for rate for Italy – and it has now lost all other countries apart from Europe…Grrr…(goes to block ITaly again, whilst I sort out the listings and postage rates we have lost)
I think that the postage rate issue may have been resolved. Perhaps someone else could also check?
Internationally, I am now concerned with messages like this from a US customer on the .com site:
‘I would like to buy several (items) from you, but the buy it now button goes directly to PayPal. So there is no way to combine shipping.’
I can confirm that my international shipping rates have stabilised as well.