When Click & Collect was first launched we thought it a bit daft that not all postage options which normally qualify for Fast ‘n’ Free were included. Now eBay have expanded the options sellers can use.
eBay it seems have been flooded with requests to include more postage options to include:
- Royal Mail 2nd Class
- Royal Mail 48
- Collect+ Standard
- Items that have a delivery estimate of up to 5 days (dispatch + postage time)
This is great news as it enables sellers who up until now couldn’t financially justify a 24 hour delivery service for free due to the price point of their products. Now economy services are included it should open up Click & Collect to many more sellers and thousands of additional products.
There is of course still a requirement that Click & Collect postage be offered for free (included in the product cost). But now sellers can offer a real choice, for instance 2nd Class postage (free, qualifies for Click & Collect), 1st Class postage (at additional cost) or 24 hour courier for those urgent orders at a higher price.
There’s no reason, if you can build a free postage option in, that you wouldn’t want to offer your customers Click & Collect. Whilst it may not be a service you would use it’s no different for a seller to shipping to the customers home address. However if you have some items which don’t qualify due to weight or size limitations you can exclude them on a case by case basis.
Great news, although if you do want to opt your listings in (or out) it does mean revising your listings, but that can be done in bulk with some eBay tools and many third party listings applications.
are on eBay help pages.
23 Responses
When does this take effect as I’ve just tried revising my listings 21:30 on 20th October BST, with 2nd class free delivery and I’m not getting click & collect for these listings?
This sounds great. Although on looking at the revised postage options only Royal Mail 48 tracked is eligible???
I assume this is an error as it says royal mail 2nd class is eligible but Royal Mail 48 is not? 48 is a far superior service than 2nd class.
It is fantastic to see eBay listening though.
I have tried it as well, as we offer Royal mail 2nd class- and I cannot get it active either – I even checked the ebay help page for this that says about opt out, as I thought I would check that – but this bit is not even visible for me,
“If you don’t want to offer Click & Collect on your eligible listings you can easily opt-out through
My eBay > Site Preferences > Edit Click & Collect > Opt-out.
Nice idea ebay – shame about the execution – has anyone got this to work on 2nd class post?
I should imagine if you haven’t been opted in to click and collect yet, updating listings won’t suddenly shown the option.
We were opted in on Friday and you get an email in your inbox to say all eligible listings are now opted in to the service.
This change will be going live tonight (Tues) so you should see it working from Wednesday, if you have been already opted into click and collect.
Both Royal Mail 48 and 2nd class will be included.
We’ll be adding more sellers into click & collect over the next few weeks, including this week, so keep an eye on your inbox.
I have been offering click n collect on my ‘other 48 hour’ courier items but the postage used on the rest is Royal Mail 48. When this changed the 47 hour items didn’t change. So I have been in contact with ebay and they have confirmed technical issues all items should be updated by end Thursday (US time). However it is still a ‘grey’ area as they can confirm 2nd class, 48 hour tracked, 2nd class sign for and collect plus will all be included but the girl I spoke to seemed to think 48hour isn’t!!! – she is away back to let the click n collect team know how daft that would actually be!!!!! 🙂
Hi Penny
I had a few listings live on click and collect. These were the ones where I had first class post.
Since the update some of my second class listings have click and collect but a lot don’t.
They are all set up with the same postage options and fast and free is checked.
Any ideas why?
Thanks
Surely Royal Mail 48 is going to be included. Penny said so above from eBay. If 2nd class is allowed and 48 isn’t then I would be amazed as it just makes no sense whatsoever. Royal Mail 48 almost always arrives within 48 hours nationwide and sometimes in 24 hours.
Hi Penny
Thanks for your reply. It was indeed a timing issue. I am rocking and rolling now. In fact I had my first C&C order today.
I will never know if I would have sold the items without C&C. It would be really interesting if you had some data that told us how many purchases are made with the C&C filter checked.
Is this data available?
Thanks
We had our welcome to ‘Click & Collect’ email yesterday and our first problem today.
Whilst I am not sure about the business logic to send customers into a competitor to collect their eBay purchases we have come across a massive oversight by eBay.
Many of our products are already excluded as they are over the weight or size restrictions but having had our first ‘Click & Collect’ order what is not calculated by eBay in their infinite wisdom is the multiple purchase of an item that is eligible for the service.
So in our case the customer ordered something relatively light and normally shipped by Royal Mail unless in our case they ordered x 20 of the item now making the shipment too heavy and large for C&C and also a courier item not postal but we do not use any of the couriers allowed?
We brought this issue to the attention of eBay CS with the unsurprising response of “Oh, we will inform the necessary department, thank you for your feedback” but they were unable to answer the problems of a) How we edit the shipping address once we had explained the problem on eBay’s behalf to the customer b) What would happen on dispatch to an alternative address when Argos C&C would be expecting a shipment that was never going to arrive with them?
Having now obtained an alternative shipping address from the disgruntled customer we will also be interested to hear eBay’s response to any negative feedback received. Our customer commented “Good old eBay, I though this was all too easy”.
EBay CS suggested maybe we opted out of C&C for the time being maybe until after Xmas until these kind of ‘teething troubles’ were ironed out.
Needless to say, we have!
Does any online marketplace offer click and collect for a combined multiple entity on a single identifier?
Answer:- No.
Not even bricks and mortar stores that have their own click and collect arrangements offer this.
Why?
Because logistic and available collection times can be different for each entity.
The only solution is that each separate entity has to have its own identifier else click and collect won’t work.
In addition as the ebay click and collect service has size limitations the only solution for ebay is to not permit click and collect for combined multiple entities and for each separate entity to have its own unique identifier.
This adds to the cost for buyers who want to use the service and who wish to order more than one entity.
Unless of course sellers and/or ebay are happy to subsidise the additional costs?
In saying all this the ebay size allowance for a single package containing multiple entities from a single seller is reasonably large and from my perspective I have never, in over 10 years, had to send out an order that exceeds the stated dimensions.
But then I don’t sell whirlpools!
All I can say is that sellers who may have size issues with multiple purchases put a listing limit on the quantity available so that if all the available stock in a single listing is purchased in one go then it will still fit within the prescribed package size.
That may mean having multiple listings of, say 10 listings of 10 items each, rather than 1 listing of 100 items, but of course ebay don’t permit this, etc, etc!
Gary just to clarify our issue related to 20 x of the same eBay item number not a shopping cart of 20 x different items.
There is also another issue with C&C which we have just discovered in our PayPal account. It seems every time a C&C order is receicved for a different Argos branch a selectable delivery address is added to your account when sending money.
Choose delivery address:
DS2987, ARGOS Unit C2, eCP:LKQ845 The Shires Ret Pk , Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, CV34 6RH, United Kingdom
DS2987, ARGOS 13A Kingfisher Walk, eCP:LKT863 Kingfisher Ctre , Redditch, Worcestershire, B97 4EY, United Kingdom
On the basis there are currently 650 stores in the program this could become quite a list!
Sellers of multiples could have separate listings for 1Nr, 2Nr, 3Nr, 4Nr, 10Nr, 20Nr, and so on up to the maximum click and collect package size. This gets around the multi purchase issue for click and collect and the multiple listing issue as each listing will have a different price. Looks like some sellers are already doing this.