Customer purchased 3 items, wants combined shipping, they say there is no request total option.

[msmith782]

Customer very inexperienced buyer, how can I help them?

[momcqueen]

Tell them to use the Shopping Cart. 

[rosscd57]

Or just give them a shipping refund.

[rose-dee]

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@mjwl2006momcqueen wrote:

Tell them to use the Shopping Cart. 

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It would be too late for that if they've used BIN and have already committed to buy.  

Actually, the Shopping Cart is still part of the problem.  For many cross-site purchases, the old "Request Total from Seller" button which used to be available during cart checkout, no longer functions properly.  It leads to a screen telling the buyer the seller has disallowed combined shipping.  This is, as many of us learned a while ago, connected with the change in the way eBay now obliges sellers to set up their automated shipping rules. 

In a nutshell -- eBay checkout is still FUBAR.   For some reason it doesn't seem to be a priority for management to ensure buyers can actually pay easily.  They're more obsessed with endlessly re-arranging the décor than doing something as boring as fixing a critical feature. 

[momcqueen]

It's definitely not 'FUBAR' for me; I have Calculated Shipping set correctly with Combined Postage rules and the appropriate postal services for the necessary destinations. It works flawlessly 99.9 per cent of the time both for my customers and any random tests that I throw at it. 

[pjcdn2005]

I don't recall reading lately about buyers seeing that message lately. Are you sure that is isn't fixed? Btw, that didn't have anything to do with cross site shopping as far as I know. Many American sellers were complaining about the same problem but as I said, I haven't seen that complaint in months.

[vintagenorth]

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@pjcdn2005 wrote:

I don't recall reading lately about buyers seeing that message lately. Are you sure that is isn't fixed? Btw, that didn't have anything to do with cross site shopping as far as I know. Many American sellers were complaining about the same problem but as I said, I haven't seen that complaint in months.

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It’s possible it is only happening to sellers who list on .com. I had a buyer last month who was buying 4 items and was from the UK and she received that message. Most of my buyers are from the US or Canada and have no problem with combined shipping.

[rose-dee]

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@mjwl2006momcqueen wrote:

It's definitely not 'FUBAR' for me; I have Calculated Shipping set correctly with Combined Postage rules and the appropriate postal services for the necessary destinations. It works flawlessly 99.9 per cent of the time both for my customers and any random tests that I throw at it. 

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That may be so in your case, but there were reports this week from sellers experiencing issues connected with calculated shipping and sudden incorrect displays of shipping amounts.  Apparently another bug being "looked into" by eBay.   And not every seller can, or wants to, list on .ca and use calculated shipping.  

This is what I mean by lack of faith in eBay's checkout system as a whole -- to be frank, they haven't been able to make it work reliably and consistently for all buyers and sellers site-wide for any reasonable length of time during all the years they've been in operation.  

At any rate, the cart issues weren't the only reason I moved to .com, and of course calculated shipping isn't available to Canadian sellers there anyway.  Since the .com cart seems to be working for my U.S. buyers who want to purchase multiple items at a time, I'm staying where I am for the moment.   At this point, I think it would take a written service guarantee from eBay promising 100% checkout function across all their sites, with a fee refund should they mess up, for me to believe they've dealt with all the problems.