eBay is one of the best known marketplaces in the world, and it is a global platform. Even in countries where eBay don’t have a dedicated country site, buyers still shop on eBay.
At Pentagon‘s Retail Without Borders conference in London, I spoke to Neil McLauchlan, Senior Manager – Global Shipping at eBay to find out more about how sellers can sell around the world.
There are three ways of selling overseas on eBay, one of which requires almost zero effort, one utilises your existing listings on your local eBay site and the third involves actively listing on overseas eBay sites. However you don’t have to pick one particular method – Neil explains how you may wish to actively list on say eBay France and eBay Germany in addition to eBay UK, but you could also add shipping to your eBay UK listings to other close European countries and still make use of eBay’s Global Shipping program to sell to countries you don’t want to ship to yourself.
To find out more check out a recent webinar on International Expansion from eBay
7 Responses
That made me laugh.
If eBay really do want retail without borders,
perhaps they could do or consider at least two things:
1) stop charging a larger FVF on exported items.
as the current fee on eBay UK is a % of postage , which clearly gets passed on somewhere, a foreign buyer is effectively surcharged
2) Make sure their baskets worldwide work properly.
I’m well fed up of buyers telling us that eBay are giving them the incorrect message that we do not combine postage.
According to eBay, for example, the Basket on the German site will only work with items listed directly on the German site.
Same applies for other eBay sites (with the exception of Canada, I believe)
As for zero effort, hah hah.
I lose track of the time I have spend guiding buyers to use the UK site to buy multiples purchases because of 2) above
eBay are a joke! Cross-border!? Ha!?
You encourage us to go cross border and we’re more than happy to cash in to grow. An anchor subscription becomes the viable option when wanting to list on international sites yet they are the only platform that impose selling limits. We have to call every month asking for an increase. Now when you start listing internationally you start reaching your selling limit and therefore have to decrease your local market offerings. If you think about launching from scratch via a new international account, say eBay.com, you start with 10-50 listings.. We have 10k products and eBay restrict exposure.
The fact is eBay is a declining, out-dated marketplace serviced by polite yet hopeless customer service and run by a bunch of arrogant and stubborn individuals. What’s funny is they would only give you attention if you were a fraudster like Babz media!
Chris publish my post!
Leigh makes some valid points.
Ebay has not addressed the structural problems in its system for overseas trade.
Buyers cannot access the basket if buying items on UK Ebay via US Ebay and other foreign sites. The different sites don’t work smoothly together with different policies on each site.
The fvf point is vaid because even when the excess postage is refunded, Ebay still keeps the fvf fee they’ve charged on that.
This must add up to millions in extra fees for Ebay.
Funny how the many problems sellers have complained about for years never seem to get fixed – as they seem to benefit Ebay financially.
If an issue crops up which COSTS Ebay money, you can bet your bottom dollar it will get sorted pronto.
Or else, like Amazon, you will get it charged back to you in a future bill “adjustment”, ignoring the countless times sellers get overcharged.
Why not have one seamless Ebay worldwide? Why not have a global buyers programme?
I have to agree that Ebay has a long way to go on improving their selling across borders.
I still don’t understand the policy of not allowing us to list directly to other sites, and offer shipping from the UK listing as well. Plenty of people purposefully visit the UK site.
They also don’t make clear how selling directly on international sites work, it took several phone calls with customer support to find out if having an ebay store on .co.uk qualified us for discounts on other channels as well. They should be making this as transparent as possible to encourage sellers
Well this is all very well. We have just dropped a featured shop for the first time in 5 years. We sold on all the available ebay sites, paid webinterpret a fee etc etc. Started with Australia the rest have followed the SALES have fell off a cliff, so we dropped the featured this is the main reason not the big price rises.
We hence dropped the featured and Webinterpret. NOW we know it is not the stock as we sell on plenty of other markets OVERSEAS direct. It is the add ons the FEES, plus so many items you just cannot send untracked due to the theft, they push the prices high.
One of the others markets we are on they are all over the mail theft, honest it is a breath of fresh air, plus it SELLS.
UK sales are awful (worst ever this year) for the Q1, so we always made it up with international over the years which have been just as poor on eBay, hence we had to move so much of our stock away from eBay. Sell overseas but there are so many better platforms available now. e.g IRELAND adverts .ie is more popular than eBay.ie for one.