eBay’s Global Shipping Programme (GSP) has enabled one million parcels to be shipped overseas as of this month, eBay reports. Launched last autumn, it has clearly proved popular. Have you taken advantage?
We like GSP. It means that sellers only offering domestic shipping options can sell to buyers abroad. The buyers pay an additional shipping fee determined by eBay and sellers can simply send their despatches to a UK location and get protection on defects too. Read up about it here.
The Global Shipping Programme means UK sellers send items to a shipping centre in the UK managed by Pitney Bowes. They handle everything else required to send the item to the buyer including managing customs, international delivery costs and import charges.
Overseas buyers see all domestic and international shipping charges upfront as a single amount during checkout so there are no unexpected charges to buyers when their purchase is delivered.
eBay notes that 10k buyers every day are buying from UK sellers using GSP.
And we expect eBay to develop the service because they’ve hired a new Director of Shipping and Logistics, Mike Pitt.
Pitt joins from Javelin Group, Europe’s leading strategy and retail consultancy, where he advised leading global retailers on their omnichannel operations strategies. His twenty year career also spans Waitrose, where he was Head of Online Operations and third party logistics company, Gist.
Tanya Lawler, head of eBay UK says: “There are 25 million businesses and consumers selling on eBay worldwide and we expect to enable $300 billion of global commerce this year alone. Mike’s love of our brand and expertise in omnichannel operations and logistics makes him an important senior addition to the eBay team at a time when we’ve invested in opening up great new opportunities for our sellers to reach buyers worldwide.”
We look forward to hearing more from him in due course.
12 Responses
Hello
Does anyone know if there are any benefits in terms of search visibility if you are using the GSP? Also do you get to see the prices that eBay is charging before you sign up to the program?
Thanks
This has been poorly executed in my experience.
Today I’ve had a buyer in Australia ask me questions about postage combining etc and I couldn’t help him as an error message came up when I tried to combine his order.
He tried to pay for both item and ebay would only let him pay for 1. So, the error message from ebay is wrong as he cannot combine items. It makes ME look beyond stupid and all I can do is ask him to contact ebay. We all know that’s worse than doing nothing.
I had a flurry of buyers lat month and only a few of these orders are tracked as delivered. Surprise, surprise Italy items have disappeared and the customers asking me where they are as they’re not given access to the tracking !
I was excited about this program, but it’s caused nothing but problems so far.
we worry that the poor service and high cost of ebays GS program will poison the international market for those of us that ship internationally properly managed ,at sensible prices
GSP sucks and after 9 months only 1 million items demonstrates how few sellers use of it. The unhappy ones that do (many) say they can not unsubscribe.
Its a totally inflated rip-off for buyers. Just offer standard shipping and you’ll sell more. Use Airmail, cheap & fast, and always arrives. The days of lost in the post and I won’t come in your mouth are long gone. Standard unsigned post is very relieable.
Interesting thing to note is that after selling an item and when you look at Order Details, it only shows the local shipping amount. In otherwords eBay are hiding from the seller the rip-off shipping cost that they are charging the buyer. No sup there I guess!
A further thing to note is that when GSP started eBay said they were making nothing and providing it as a free service. Recently they have incresed prices so eBay now make something. Didn’t take them long but no sup there either I guess!
Long live The Revolution!! 🙂
High costing and poor service is much questionable indeed. If a new offering like GSP program is going to add more barrier to the market, then it is definitely not appreciating.
Richard Joseph
HeadStokcksTransport