As mentioned above, here are my comments and Rodney's reply from the July 5th Wed. board session. I really don't see an acknowledgement that this problem needs any kind of priority attention on eBay's part -- not even a promise to take it up with the higher echelons at eBay.
Rodney seems to think these are issues that are frustrating only to me and very few others (in which I think he's very wrong - a lot of buyers may be affected too). He says that compromises have to be made with resources. Fair enough, I get that, I really do. But I fail to grasp what is more important than allowing all buyers, everywhere on eBay, whatever they choose, to checkout easily. Meanwhile, eBay continues to monkey around with the décor of the site. Maybe the reason eBay doesn't have more multi-item orders at the moment (he argues they'd like more) is at least partly due to this problem.
I don't like to be cynical, but it almost sounds like the kind of suggestion you'd get from a second-rate hotel when the hot water doesn't work or the door won't lock properly -- it doesn't affect the majority, they're minor issues, it's your problem, find a workaround. Oh well...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(From July 5th, Post #38) in this thread: http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Weekly-Chat-Session/July-5-2017-Weekly-Session/td-p/377833/page/2
My post:
I expect eBay will say that all a seller has to do to avoid having buyers see the "no combined discounts" error message is to toggle the "offer combined discounts" option on within Seller Preferences. That's true, but the reason this issue remains a problem is because eBay doesn't see it as anything they need to fix. What they really need to do is either:
1) Make sellers aware of what they have to do to avoid it, via a general-distribution email explaining the issue in detail, preferably with visual examples on what steps and options lead to which results.
Incidentally, a few months ago there was an odd banner message/warning that ran for a while on the top of .com SYI pages that referred to combined discounts. It was so perplexing and incoherent that I couldn't make any sense of it at the time. Now, in retrospect, I think it was a warning to sellers to turn on "offer combined discounts" (and possibly also to use automated rules only) -- but this needs to be stated far more clearly and understandably for the average seller to grasp what needs to be done.
OR:
2) Change the system so that not toggling the discounts to "on" does not generate the error screen that is so confusing and frustrating to buyers.
It seems that by introducing the option to turn on combined discounts or not, eBay has somehow knocked out the part of its checkout system that used to allow buyers to ask for a manually-adjusted total from within the cart (using "Request Total").
I can say that I've had the same inability to request a total from a cart as a buyer several times over the past few months, and based on the explanations I've been given by the eBay staffers, I now know why -- my sellers probably had no idea whatsoever that they had to toggle the combined discount option on. Whether having that option turned on avoids the "seller does not offer discounts" error screen even if a seller hasn't set up any automated discounts/rules, I really don't know. Perhaps one of the eBay people could test and confirm this.
This is such an critical function (in fact you could argue it's the most critical function of an online selling platform) that it's beyond belief why it hasn't been fully resolved before now. Surely eBay doesn't want to lose all the FVFs generated by those multi-item orders, or worse -- lose confused and frustrated buyers from the site entirely.
Rodney's reply:
Thanks for the suggestion. I know these issues are very frustrating for you. We do take things seriously. It is important to point out that these are not dominant use cases at all. The overwhelming majority of the millions of items bought every day are single item purchases, and almost all of our combined item checkouts each day are successful as well.
We'd love to have more multi-order purchases but we don't. There are some sellers whose business model lends itself to combined discounts, and we've got tools for them that actually work well, though they are tricky to find and sometimes tricky to use for sure. I think we can better at that, but this is not an area of focus for 2017. Again, not that it isn't important, but resource trade-offs always need to be made, no matter how many developers we hire.
We've also got use cases that we won't reasonably be able to support more elegantly any time soon - for example, sellers who want to be able to quote back combined actual shipping before purchase with an infinite number of package types and sizes and weights. That type of approach unfortunately doesn't work very well on eBay now with the immediate pay / retail standard experience. Not like it used to, at least.
The best workaround for those type of sellers would be a request total flow - so another reason to try to get that flow back. But even in those cases, I wonder whether some sellers (not necessarily you) might be better to reconsider their strategy - I mean, you can wait for eBay to change to work the way you want it to, or try to make the best of what the platform does offer. For example, sellers with complex combined shipping rules could consider simplifying the rules, moving to flat rate for some or all items, or even offering free shipping and pushing an average ship value into the item price.
That approach won't work for all, I know, but it's a thought.
w~~_7.JPG "pjcdn2005"){kind=avatar}
