November 13th Weekly Board Hour

[bryan.ca@ebay.ca]

Looking forward to your questions at 1PM (Eastern)!

Bryan

[troutotronic]

Hi everyone.

[Anonymous]

Greetings from Toronto.

[pierrelebel]

Good afternoon Rodney.

If I had known the "big boss" would be with us today, I would have prepared a difficult question!

In the last few months, I would guess that half the posts on eBay.ca discussion boards relate to GSP with most Canadian buyers left unsatisfied with their experience.

What is eBay.ca doing to improve the situation?  Is it something Canadians will have to live with or can we expect changes or improvements to minimize some of the problems?

What is eBay.com doing to better educate American sellers on the value of GSP - when to use it and how it affects buyers?

The question of clarity has often been raised.  What are eBay, Pitney-Bowes and PayPal doing to improve the issue where buyers would know exactly how much is charged for transportation, how much is charged for duty, how much is charged for HST/GST/PST, how much is charged as a "handling fee"?

[Anonymous]

Hi Pierrelebel.

I'm usually haunting these threads even when not posting directly. 🙂

Great questions. The idea of the Global Shipping Program is a great one but the execution on that program is not as good as what we would like just yet.

My team in Canada has been working closely with our US-based counterparts to find ways to make it more attractive to both buyers and sellers. We have been sharing both quantitative data around listing conversion and buyer performance, but much more importantly, also the qualitative responses and reactions of our buyers. Whether it comes from the boards here, emails and calls we have received, surveys, etc., we have been sharing the findings with the US teams.

We are working on plans to make product improvements along the lines of what buyers have been asking for, and to drive both cost and ship time out of the solution. We're paying attention. 🙂

I'm not as close to what is happenening with seller eduction, but I believe that is an active area as well. From the way the program was introduced to sellers, the majority of sellers who you see adopting the program are sellers who were previously not exporters, so we're growing the inventory and selection available to Canadians. Now just need to make it work better. A buyer opt-out, for example, is something we are hoping to be able to do (still not firm on those plans though).

Cheers.

[pocomocomputing]

This eBay help page still has incorrect shipping info 25% discount for Expedited Parcel. Expand Shipping Items to see this. Also no mention of Tracked Packet and its discount.

http://pages.ebay.ca/sellerinformation/shipping/carrierprograms/cpc.html

[pierrelebel]

Thank you Rodney for your post.

Do you have any wise words to address the lack of clarity question? 

It is a major problem that should be relatively easy to address and solve.

[bryan.ca@ebay.ca]

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@pocomocomputing wrote:

This eBay help page still has incorrect shipping info 25% discount for Expedited Parcel. Expand Shipping Items to see this. Also no mention of Tracked Packet and its discount.

http://pages.ebay.ca/sellerinformation/shipping/carrierprograms/cpc.html

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Thanks, I'll let the team know to investigate.

Bryan

[Anonymous]

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@pierrelebel wrote:

Thank you Rodney for your post.

Do you have any wise words to address the lack of clarity question? 

It is a major problem that should be relatively easy to address and solve.

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Hi pierrelebel.

What we've heard from different buyers in difference scenarios is that they would like to see a split between shipping, taxes, duties (where applicable) and handling/brokerage fees. eBay's Global Shipping team is working with our vendor to see how easy or difficult it would be to pull those values apart for our buyers. They are also looking at the complexity for our own systems, to see what would be involved. 

Is that what you mean by lack of clarity?