@paulgg132 wrote:
Thank you very much ebay for restricting my account for trying to do business. Your complete failure to provide me with the shopping cart services you charge me for. You force my customers to contact me looking for ways to make multiple item purchases.
It is maddening, and very frustrating. I've been banging on this drum with the eBay Canada people for several months now, but they seem to think it's a minor issue. You might want to see my posts on the thread linked below, including Post #65. I've also linked your thread there, because I'm hoping someone at eBay may see that this isn't just one or two sellers who are affected.
http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/Ebay-Chat/td-p/381818/highlight/false
So, if it will help, here's why this is happening to your customers, from what I've been able to glean from the eBay reps, and what you might be able to do that could stop it (not guaranteed, but worth a try):
1) Months ago, eBay changed the system that controlled shipping discounts (not the cart itself actually, although this does affect the way multiple items put into the cart are handled on checkout). It appears eBay re-programmed seller preferences to make it necessary for sellers to specify "allow combined discounts" in the seller "Preferences" section in order for buyers to be able to use the "Request Total" feature;
2) A lot of sellers will be completely unaware of this, and may never had had "allow combined discounts" option turned on in the first place. I suspect some sellers might not even know it exists. This results in the "Request Total" feature being completely disabled for their buyers. EBay did (in my view) an extremely poor job of informing sellers of this fact. And that's the problem. They ran one rather obscurely worded banner warning on the SYI forms (at least on .com) for a few weeks, and that was it. I saw the warning, but it didn't make sense to me until much later when I was able to put 2 and 2 together.
3) It appears that if you have "allow combined discounts" toggled on in your "Preferences" section (under "Seller Preferences"), whether or not you actually have automated shipping discount rules set up, your buyers will be able to see and use the "Request Total" feature.
4) There is some uncertainty over whether this is true in all cases, on all sites. I happen to have my "combined discounts" option turned on, and I have one automated rule set up (buy 4, get free shipping). When one of the eBay reps tried putting several of my .ca items into the eBay.ca cart, he was able to access "Request Total". I'm not sure whether that would also be true of my .com listings and the .com cart.
So if you list on eBay.ca only, and turn on "allow combined discounts" in "Preferences", your buyers should be able to use "Request Total" for multi-item orders, at least according to the most recent tests.
I still don't have clarification from anybody about the situation on .com, but if you list on eBay.com and don't have your "allow combined discounts" option turned on, you may want to do that. At the very least, it can't make things any worse.
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