sending invoice to a buyer who can't bid

[steveyboy1969]

I sell to Canada and the US, but international buyers have to email me for a shipping quotet. One person did, I gave it to them and they want me to send them the invoice with the shipping rate I gave them, but I cannot seem to do it. Is this not possible and if not, why?

[rose-dee]

Have you got your shipping preferences set up to exclude the country the buyer is from?  You need to allow international shipments to a particular country to be able to invoice a buyer in that country.  Check your exclusion list to see. 

I discovered that it is possible to change the exclusions in the middle of a transaction to permit invoicing (and permit a buyer to pay).  Go to your Preferences for shipping - look for shipping exclusions and revise the list so that the buyer's country is not on that list. 

If this isn't your issue, I'm not sure I know what is  --  maybe someone else has other ideas. 

[pocomocomputing]

rose-dee, I would think that adding the buyer eBay id to you Site Preferences Buyer Requirements Exception list would allow the buyer to be invoiced rather than manipulating the country exclusion list.  I have had buyers from an excluded country send me a message asking to be allowed to buy and all I did was add that buyer id to the exemption list. Now I have not done this in a couple of years but I do remember having no issues by just using the exemption list.

[steveyboy1969]

The potential buyer could not bid as they were an international customer,  yet my item WAS set up to accept intl customers. They kept getting the message that shipping wasn't specified by the seller and couldn't get past that. For some reason or another, EBay has no option to send an invoice without a bid, so after a lot of runaround, I lost the sale.

It is odd that Ebay would put hurdles in my way to sell, depsite sales being its raison d'être .

[rose-dee]

Did you have an international shipping option shown, set to "worldwide", and an actual international shipping cost set up?  If not, that might be the problem.  

As I mentioned before, if you have set your listing set up to ship to certain international destinations only (for example, UK), anyone outside of those places will not be able to be invoiced, because shipping must be added by the seller.  

'poco' - I hadn't thought of using the buyer requirements exception list to let a particular buyer make a purchase (or receive an invoice), but it makes sense that that would work too!  As I say, I found out that simply revising the shipping exclusion list after the customer contacted me saying they were having trouble paying, did the trick, allowing me to send an invoice. 

[pjcdn2005]

For some reason or another, EBay has no option to send an invoice without a bid, so after a lot of runaround, I lost the sale.

You can't send an invoice unless someone buys something on ebay. Otherwise, it is considered an off-ebay sale and there would be no way for ebay to charge you final value fees.

Under the id you are posting with, some of the items have a shipping price for Canada only & some to Canada and the U.S. None of the listings have a shipping price to any other country. If the shipping cost was listed for the buyers country, that might have allowed them to bid.