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I'm starting to get foreign buyers asked why they are excluded from my listings. I offer items Worldwide without ANY exclusions but I'm now seeing the following countries excluded on all my listings:
Excludes: India, Brazil, Israel, Philippines, Ukraine, Indonesia, Jamaica, Qatar, Singapore, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Chile, Cameroon, Colombia, Morocco, South Africa, Malaysia, Egypt, Latvia, Kuwait, Macedonia, Costa Rica
This was added in the last couple of days because as recent as last week I had orders from at least one of those countries.
Perhaps these are added because Canada Post is not accepting mail to these locations but not everyone ships via Canada Post. I don't and I don't need or want my listings blocked. I certainly don't want to have these exclusions added without any notice.
Can somebody explain what is going on? Why this action was taken and why it's being forced on me?
I understand there are risks with international shipping right now, I'm quite willing to accept those risks. This seems like ridiculous babysitting and I'm not a child!
Sure I get that but I do not use Canada Post and I have been shipping to some of the countries included in their list.
Not only have I been shipping to these countries but my packages are being DELIVERED there.
Yes still selling on other id's.
For whatever it's worth, after a 10 day dip in sales mid-March things have really come back strong. That includes things that I only list during promos, those items some of which I've been listing for years normally sell 2 - 5% during a promo but that has gone WAY up in the past 10 days.
I'm also getting orders from countries that I don't normally see with any regularity. Canadian orders are also up but that has been a trend for a couple of years.
I might end up having to do a bunch of refunds which will be unpleasant, it was a similar situation years ago when the Iceland volcano eruption led to chaos in Europe when air space was closed for 3 weeks, lost a few packages at that time but for the most part it was just delays.
I'm not a high volume seller anymore so it's hard to determine cause/effect but one thing is for sure. There are millions of people out there who are tied up at home that have plenty of money to spend on frivolous stuff, even more these days when they aren't "wasting" it at bars, restaurants, concerts, movies or B&M retailers.
I see there is an announcement on .com from April 3rd
Partial quote:
What you need to know about shipping packages outside of the US.
There are service disruptions around the world as local shipping carriers decide to suspend in-country deliveries. Below we are listing the countries that are impacted.
If buyers from one of these countries have already purchased an item from you but it has not yet been shipped, you will not be able to print a shipping label. As of March 20, we will suspend label printing services for the listed countries.
To deter future purchases, while they are not able to be delivered, buyers may be able to view listings in search, but if they select the listing they will see a message that ‘this seller’ (you) does not ship to their country. Buyers will not be able to checkout and will be warned throughout the experience the product will not ship to their location.
If you recently shipped a package to one of the countries that have since suspended their postal operations, the status of that package depends on the service you used to ship it.
For packages shipped with USPS international services, USPS will hold any shipments en route and deliver them once when the postal system in the buyer’s country resumes operations.
For eBay international standard delivery, the process will vary based upon whether the package has already been processed by our consolidation center at the time of country suspension. If the package has been processed by the consolidation center and is in transit internationally, we will hold these shipments and have them delivered once the postal system in the buyer’s country resumes operations. If the package has not been processed by our consolidation center, we will be returning the shipment to you. You will be refunded the cost of the eBay international delivery label on your next invoice and will not be charged for the return shipping label.
There is minimal impact on eBay’s Global Shipping Program due to the use of both in-country postal systems and private carriers. However, estimated delivery times have been extended in many areas experiencing some delays.
From what I'm seeing there is a different exclusion list there (US) than the one that has been showing on my .ca listings.
All I can say is:
1 - I don't use eBay "carrier partners" for International
2 - I don't print my shipping labels through eBay or any of it's "partners"
3 - I want to choose for myself where and where not to ship to
4 - I'd be SHOCKED if eBay was at all up to date on where the problems might exist, things are changing on a daily basis and in the past eBay has demonstrated that they have little skill in the logistics area (after all, any involvement they have is all run by third-parties like Pitney-Bowes)
Fortunately I've found some workarounds I can use with experienced buyers IF they ask (and no there isn't ANY fee avoidance involved). Let's just say that it can be a good thing that there is no address verification on eBay!
Thanks for the tags @ypdc_dennis & @richardcm!
Hi @recped - I'm still trying to get all the details on this myself, apologies. As far as I can tell 25 international corridors were administratively blocked earlier this week, meaning buyers with shipping addresses in those countries will not be able to purchase any item listed by any seller.
I'm working to get more detail on when/if this will be announced (and where) and will keep folks updated. I'll pass on the questions raised too to see if we can get them preemptively addressed rather than having to chase it down later. 🙂
"Mass Update" ?????
If you want to exclude countries you can set up and define them in less than a minute and they will apply to ALL your listings.
If you are really worried about shipping to countries where there are currently issues with mail delivery the list of countries that eBay has added is woefully limited and doesn't match up with the lists of problem countries as defined by Canada Post, USPS, UPS, FedEX etc.
Whoever compiled the list simply doesn't have a clue what they are doing.
Yes I remember seeing this discussed somewhere in a thread where I can just change it on my main account rules, but I have this spider sense that there might be problems with doing that against grandfathered stuff and I dearly do not want some sort of glitch forcing me to update somewhere around 3000 grandfathered items (this would be a couple 100 hours of work for me) either when I do it, or try to undo it
It's simple, you pick the exclusions you want, tick the box to apply to current running listingas, click on OK and you are done.
Turning them off is exactly the same process.
It's very simple, takes about a minute or two at most and that all depends on how much time you dither when selecting locations to block (if you do it by continent it's REALLY simple).
If you wanted to restrict to USA/Canada it's even easier since you just pick those two as ship to and then set the block "block buyers in countries I don't ship to".
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