Hello Canadian eBayers!
This is our weekly chat. You can start posting at your convenience, we will join you at 1 PM Eastern as usual.
@00nevermind00 wrote:
Thanks for the reply to my earlier question Raphael. Do you know how long this test is going to run? If the test is successful, will this change become permanent? Should we expect further GSP-related tests impacting buyers?
Unfortunately these are all things that aren't yet determined.
@pierrelebel wrote:
"This test shouldn't have any material impact for any US seller."
????
The listings by American sellers are NOT seen by Canadian buyers and... "shouldn't have any material impact for any US seller"
Maybe I need another cup of coffee because I do not get it.
The parts to keep in mind are:
- These listings are not gone, they just appear lower in some of the search result sets
- Only part of the Canadian traffic is exposed to this test
@pjcdn2005 wrote:
I think that I mentioned this before but the quick listing form is very misleading for new sellers because they are only allowed to give one shipping cost to both the U.S. and the rest of the world. Shipping costs seem to be what most new sellers have the most problems with and the form is only compounding the problem. A new seller may see that it costs $15 with delivery confirmation to send a package to the U.S. with Tracked Packet and assume that is the international price to send it to anywhere. Then when they go to send the package to their UK buyer they would find out that tracked packet is going to cost them $40+. Either they pay that money themselves or ask the buyer to pay the extra amount. In both cases, someone is going to be unhappy (and perhaps never come back to ebay) and in my opinion, the problem happened because of the way that form was set up.
Sellers who use the calculated shipping option are going to be just as confused or even more so because the Canada Post services for the U.S. are totally different than for other countries. They may enter that the package is 100 grams 20x20x 5cm and they will be using small packet international to send the package. Because that service is not available in the U.S. their listings will only show buyers a shipping cost for the other 'international' countries and not the U.S. That could result in lost sales for the seller because there is no U.S. shipping price in the search results.
Is anyone looking at a solution for these problems?
Hi pjcdn2005,
The quick listing tool is a novice seller tool, designed to simplify the listing process as much as possible by showing less options and make the end to end process shorter. Shipping is by far the most complicated part of selling on eBay, especially for Canadians. Simplifying that part obligatorily means leaving some parts out, like extra shipping services for international sales. Sellers who require more complete set of options should move to the advanced listing form, what we know as SYI.
@rose-dee wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
Hi rose-dee,
Before anything else, I'd like to congratulate you for how alert you are with these things. I'm not joking when I say it's surprisingly rare! It's always a good practice to be safe rather than sorry.
With that said, what you saw was an unfortunate technical issue that sent users to our internal testing site when they clicked certain links in the header (this is what that paradise URL was, it's a mock eBay site we use to test things, completely harmless). I appreciate that it may have looked scary, but no one was ever in danger and no hackers were involved I promise. It was all on the eBay domain.
I tried to copy and paste that URL into a Word document, but decided for safety's sake to just shut down my laptop completely that night, so I don't have it saved.
I appreciate this logical explanation, but what happened to "https" during that process (which is supposed to keep us secure when signing in). It was nowhere to be found in the URL.
As I said it's an internal testing site, never meant for public use. SSL certification (eg. getting the https to show up in the URL) is only necessary for public use.
@pocomocomputing wrote:
Then how come I was opted in? I think you can still opt in but the links are not shown online. In TL at the top there was and still is a prominent hyperlink message at the top of the TL main page to click here for info on BP which goes online and has links to opt in. I have seen a few posts where seller opted in through the TL info link.
It's possible that the TL opt-in link was overlooked. I'll let the right people know.
This concludes our weekly chat for today. Thanks everyone and see you next week, and for our Quebecois friends: bonne St-Jean!
Featured Posts
