A number of people have discovered that their “Free Postage” listings on eBay UK are being presented to buyers with a chargeable postage method displayed, making it look like their items are more expensive than they really are.
What appears to be happening is that they cost for their second postage option is being displayed instead of the first free postage option. As an example one user posted a search image on the eBay forums for a £100 bag with an additional £10 postage cost – that’s a price increase of 10%.
In this case their first postage option was for “Free P&P United Kingdom Economy Delivery (Royal Mail 2nd Class)” , but eBay were displaying their second postage option “£10.00 United Kingdom Express Delivery (Royal Mail Special Delivery (TM) 1:00 pm)”.
It appears that if you can get customer services to understand the problem that they may be able to fix your affected listings – at least the one mentioned above has been fixed. However we are still seeing others with the same issue live on eBay on Sunday evening.
Have you checked your listings – do you have any that should display Free Postage but which the cost of your second postage option is showing?
39 Responses
Is this the ‘disruption’ Andy Lippert was talking about? ?
Seems to be an intermittent issue, as I refreshed the page & the affected listings reverted back to showing free postage.
Yep I have had the same problem all week with most of my listings. this will explain a decrease in sales
Another glitch that effects sellers weekend sales we were down 60% over last weekend thanks eBay
Same problem here. This may explain the drop in sales again. Do Ebay expect me to go through my 4000 listings and tell them which ones are affected? All the recent disruptions caused by Ebay themselves raise questions around the service Ebay is providing versus the fees we pay for that service.
11 on the first page in 200 view best match of our listings have this issue.8 on the second page, im not going through 36k of listings to see how many in total but its gonna be a lot
Is anyone REALLY surprised?
running out of nails for ebay’s coffin, best buy some more from ebay if i can find them using search, oh wait it’s broke and nail polish won’t work
I would be really interested to hear when and if this is fixed and or if anyone has spoken to anyone at ebay about it
anyone else also have a swathe of return customers unable to order over the weekend?
had at least three emails this morning from repeat customers unable to place a repeat order; which means there’s probably been another dozen who didnt bother to message and just bought elsewhere.
appears to have been fixed for one of the three when they tried again today.
This is the response I got when I contacted eBay Customer Support about a listing of mine that was not showing the free postage in search results:
Stephen
12:10 PM
Hello Elizabeth. I sincerely understand how you feel about this as you wish to know why is the free P&P not showing on the search results page.
Stephen
12:11 PM
Let me share with you that even if you offer free P&P, it doesn’t mean that it will be the postage option that will show when the item is being searched. It is still based on the best match ranking. To know more about this, please refer to the link below: https://sellercentre.ebay.co.uk/how-best-match-works
I’m still trying to get my head around this one.
As the second option of postage is usually a faster one you have to ask yourself if this is an ebay experiment? After all we all know that Amazon are offering faster and faster delivery and ebay arent. By showing the faster option it looks better (plus ebay make more money obviously!)
However in their infinite wisdom Ebay have missed the white elephant in the room…. alot of sellers have extended delivery or dispatch times to cover themself due to ebays dispatch metrics which dont actually apply to what they say (says dispatch time…. but marked on delivery time!)
All in all its just another example of ebay being run by chimps.
“It appears that if you can get customer services to understand the problem….”
LOL.
It doesn’t seem to be a consistent issue (at least with our listings).
Search once and the issue appears (charged postage option instead of free). Hit refresh and the same search result shows free postage…
Really worth checking your listings in depth as at first glance it may look like everything is fine for you but after 2-3 searches you may find that the issue is occurring and costing you business.
My gut feeling is its a change with ebay’s search and is happening to all accounts but only shows on a set percentage of listings at a time…
This is still happening and eBay is not doing anything by the look of it. This should be Number 1 on their technical issues list but no, the Techies are on their holiday… Really embarrassing for a company like eBay. No wonder SALES ARE ABYSMAL….
Still, happening. Pressed refresh a million times with no change. However, I have 3 listings that show in the same search term and 1 shows as having this issue which was created on the 28th, but the other two created before that show “free shipping” correctly.
The main concern (other than it being almost impossble to find an option to be able to speak to a customer service person!!)… is that most seller who use Free Shipping include the actual cost of shipping in the offer price. Therefore it looks really expensive with the expedited postage option showing on the main search page.. grrrr!
We don’t offer free postage so we seem unaffected.
The last time I went to the post office and asked for the free delivery service I was told it didn’t exist.
We only use eBay now to drive traffic to our own website.
OVER a week has gone by and this is still not fixed !
I contacted Ebay CS tonight, they said they were aware of the problem and suggested I manually revised all of my affected listings and added a line saying “Free Shipping” in the description field. Once I had picked my jaw up from the floor, I asked did Ebay really think the solution was asking their sellers to do more work due to Ebays faults, and if so,how much were they prepared to pay me for doing it?
After 3 cut and paste replies from CS I called it a night and ended the online chat.
I wonder what response I would get from my customers if I told them I was having technical issues with Royal Mail and the way round it was to come and get their stuff themselves……. you couldn’t make it up.
Add us to the list, logged out of ebay and checked today and our items that are freepost are all showing the expedited delivery charge, item that is being sold at £2 has a £4.99 postage costs underneath it. all our items have the same problem, ebay tell me don’t know when it’s going to be fixed, not happy, considering putting our holiday settings on as our best match placement is being seriously affected.
Had the same issue as everyone else, free post items displaying our special delivery price making all our products look like they are £5.99 more expensive than they should be. Losing loads of sales over this. Told ebay and showed them our products not hopeful they ‘ll fix this anytime soon.
Ebays systems have been showing £19.99 on a large number of our items that are actually listed as £7.90 shipping. Sales of those items have gone from 4 per day to just 2 in 4 weeks i just keep being told by eBay that their tech guys are working on it.
Yet they keep ploughing on with other updates rather than fix this issue.
Would they be happy if their system was shut down for 4 weeks
I contacted CS on the 26th of April & again yesterday as for me things have gone from bad to worse.
Each time I’ve been told that tech team is aware of this but no fix date, it’s been 12 days.
I asked why there is no announcement, again was told she will “pass that suggestion ” to another team.
I wanted to pull my hair out! it’s so frustrating to get any info from CS when things go terribly wrong & it’s affecting people’s incomes & lives.
I remember that this appalling, inferior type of programming infected ebay’s site around the same time when eBay added the feature “Write an Item Review” to it.
They have added this to all our listings without any prior warning & without asking permission, it’s impossible to opt out of it without ending all listings & starting from fresh again, loosing all your sales history.
Most of my bestsellers have now gone so down in searches,I’m no longer able to find it in the first 10 pages of search.
This is entirely due to eBay “adding” astronomical domestic postage charges where I offer free postage, as Cassini will demote any listing with p&p charge.
To make things worse when I checked ebay.com my items are advertised as offering ‘Free International Shipping” !! – I dont offer it at all, I charge a lot for tracked international shipping.
Is this even legal ? how can ebay mislead & lie to my customers & in the process keep destroying my business by telling them I charge a lot for domestic postal services ( where I do not) & then offer free international shipping ( where I charge for it), I mean it’s the other way round !
The sales on my popular items have abruptly stopped & new items disappearing from searches daily as each time a page is refreshed new listings are affected.
Some listings seems to be permanently affected & some intermittently, the postage shows & then goes.
I’m sure that buyers wont refresh ebay pages a few times, they’ll just go away thinking that eBay sellers no longer offer “free p&p” & the total price is horrendous, so Amazon now looks like much cheaper alternative to buy the same item.
It seems none at eBay cares.
sorry for the long rant,
Jo
postage search display fiasco still happening, this cd is showing as £50 postage in search instead of free, https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Bob-Dylan-John-Wesley-Harding-CD-1989-/381494295580?hash=item58d2d4fc1c:g:hOIAAOSw~OdVcruZ
I have contacted eBay several times and recently phoned them. Useless: no explanation no advice on timescale getting it resolved! On Tuesday night when I called, was advised I was one of 182 reports that day! Claimed it is their priority technical issue to resolve. I tried to find out what other issues were more pressing!
I have taken the bold step of removing next day postage options and now not eligible for fee discount. Instantly I had a flurry of sales but gone flat again! I expect buyers are buying on other sites now.
Ridiculous situation – I firmly believe it is a ploy to make buyers do the same – since if lots of sellers elect to sacrifice their discount to remain competitive on postage, eBay will earn more on fees!
Really hate the site right now and wish there was a credible non eBay / Amazon alternative
Still not fixed, I can see this is happening to a lot of my listings. I’ve gone from 5-10 sales a day to 1-3 despite doubling the amount of products I list.
Shambles…
My sales are down around 70% over this fiasco, I can see the figures on a graph almost exactly to the day I first discovered it (I check all my listings daily). I have telephoned ebay over this three times for the last week and a half. Been constantly fobbed off saying ‘the technical team are working on it’, ‘it’s their top priority’ and all the rest of the usual BS. My listings are now slowly slipping down the ‘best match’ results because no one is buying them because they appear more expensive than my competitors. Top this off with some bast@rd stealing my images (which are clearly watermarked) over two months ago, which I’ve reported no less than SIX times via the reporting feature and several times via telephone to always receive the same fob off. I’m seriously now just considering calling it a day. ebay has rapidly become a marketplace for idiots asking stupid questions, and fraudsters to claim they haven’t received the item. Or, if sent tracked then it was ‘damaged’. Complete and utter farce.
Mine are down about 50% due to this problem I complained to eBay and got a good will months shop credit so at lest the credit will cover a couple of days loss of profit what will the offer next week if its still not fixed ?
I rang ebay top customer service just now. I was told this problem was discovered “last week – late last week actually” and that a resolution was in the works and should be ready in 48 hours. I think the poor woman had nothing concrete to say so she tried to cheer me up. One would think that at some point ebay needs to inform buyers to maintain some confidence.
After spending hours editing all our items to get round this glitch by removing the express delivery option on all the free post items
Now UK customers are getting results showing our international postage rate I give up when will eBay fix this problem its no longer funny
New eBay app not displaying variation for multi variation listing when browsing , and nearly always defaults to the most expensive option available with no indication to the buyer that there are other options to chose from just the highest price displayed?
Has anyone else notices a drop insales from when the new app dropped? 2weeks today, I believe this is why, it does show these options when browsing items on android but not in iOS .
I have contacted eBay and they say it is a bug and have had some reports on this…. Every please have a look at your listings by just browsing them and see if this is affecting you ? If so please contact eBay so they can amend it !
Regards
Steven
The postage glitch is back with a twist
Now its US listings showing free delivery to the UK when they are part of the global shipping scheme.
The side effect is these listings are been promoted up the match and UK sellers are been demoted.