eBay have at last announced that their is to be made available from September. This is a new way for sellers who don’t currently offer International Shipping to appeal to new buyers from overseas. eBay will start to opt eligible listings into the new program and display them to overseas buyers from September. eBay will let you know when your listings are included in the program.
For those not familiar with the Global Shipping program, eBay started running a pilot program in the UK back in 2012. The program has been live in the US for several years. Basically when an international buyer makes a purchase, you the seller ship to eBay’s UK hub and from then on they take responsibility for delivering the parcel overseas including all customs, duty and tracking. The only change that you as a seller will notice will be a reference number included in the address so that eBay’s shipping centre can identify your parcel.
To be eligible for the Global Shipping Program: The item must weigh no more than 30kg; The maximum item size is 50cm x 50cm x 50cm; and PayPal must be offered as a payment method.
Importantly eBay will protect you from any delivery-related defects once the item has arrived safely to the UK
Shipping Centre.
The only one downside I can see from the Global Shipping Program is for those sellers who are VAT registered and may have to track EU and Rest of the World sales in order to complete their VAT returns. Other than that, why wouldn’t you want to ship using eBay’s Global Shipping Program as it’s no different to shipping to a normal UK address.
7 Responses
From the Help:
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For countries where you currently offer international postage, the Global Shipping Programme isn’t right for you at the moment. You’ll find your existing postage rates are more competitive.
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So, to be eligible, I have to *remove* any current international shipping options from my listings – is that correct?
I wonder what shipping cost they will be charging to my international customers? I’m a little tired of items not arriving internationally, so would rather be a little less competitive and take advantage of this service.
This will make little difference to International buyers unless it will reduce and standardise the P&P price from US & UK EBay sellers to countries like Ireland as it is usually prohibitively expensive relative to domestic delivery rates and uncompetitive as a result.
EBay should pass on bulk postage rates to buyers from International destinations if they wish to really promote cross border ecommerce
I am coming back to eBay after a break of a few months and catching up with the news.
I have been trying to read up on the Global Shipping Programme and, for all the pages of information, I see no clear explanation of the financial implications, in other words, who pays what to whom?
Can anyone point me to *specific* information on the subject (rather than theories. I have plenty of those!)?
Mark
If you drill down through all the hype you eventually find the ‘Terms and Conditions’
https://pages.ebay.co.uk/shipping/globalshipping/seller-tnc.html
There are some ‘hard to swallow’ aspects and if I were a Private Seller I would find them unreasonable to the extent that they are probably illegal.
That’s the only downside you see – how about me who has just had a customer buy a watch and even though I offer free shipping and ship myself, has had another additional charge to PitneyBowes appear on his Paypal which is almost as much as the item cost him, I did not receive this money, eBay did and no notification for me to do anything. The way I see this is that opting listings in automatically to this scam is basically FRAUD. I don’t want it, I never asked for it, my customers dont want it and yet they are being charged for this shipping service that nobody has requested and I have to go and opt OUT of this – how does my customer get his money back? I can’t refund him a giant shipping charge that I have never received. It’s a SCAM.
My product liability insurance on our own brand products does not cover us outside Europe, when I took the cover I confirmed the products would not be sold globally. I have taken the decision not to sell internationally and I do not want eBay offering this service on our products.
Parcel Motel orders for the Republic of Ireland already cause problems for us with regards to delivery times and buyers chasing delivery even though the parcel has been delivered to PM hub. We have no control over buyers using Parcel Motel addresses.