eBay

raphael@ebay.com · ‎11-11-2016

Hello Canadian Sellers,

Special announcement to conclude this very eventful week: the eBay.com shopping cart has been updated. As of now, any eBay item, regardless of which site it was listed on, will work in the shopping cart on eBay.com.

What does this mean?

This means that US buyers (or any buyer who shops on eBay.com) will now be able to purchase multiple items from you via the shopping cart and have these items automatically combined into a single order.

More details here:

http://announcements.ebay.ca/2016/11/11/7920/

I'd like to thank those of you who have been directly impacted by the limitations that afflicted the eBay.com shopping cart for your patience as we worked to get this update to materialize.

Have a great weekend!

maggiebvintage2010 · ‎11-14-2016

This is not a substitute for eBay making its own announcement. This is the first time since eBay's inception that the US (and apparently UK) cart can accept purchases of items listed on other sites. Since US buyers must account for a huge chunk of eBays business, I would think that this is important news, especially advantageous to draw attention to at the busiest shopping time of the year. You may even find your own business increase if US buyers and other .com shoppers know they can now add your items to their cart instead of buying each item separately - it streamlines the shopping experience, and what shopper doesn't love that convenience. Not to mention that it encourages more purchases. I find it mind-boggling that an announcement wouldn't be made. There is no announcement on the UK site either.

When eBay makes modifications to its site that affect users, they should make users aware of those changes. How many times have there been posts on these boards complaining about that? This is a good news story. Surely it merits an announcement by eBay.com on eBay.com (& .uk).

rose-dee · ‎11-14-2016

@i.am.vivian wrote:
What was interesting to note (or not!) was that even though I added the CDN $ item first, the USD one came up first at the checkout. I interpret that to mean that if a buyer is going to give up and not bother to pay twice (highly unlikely IMO) they will at least be buying the USD items no matter what order things are added to the cart or where the item is coming from.
Whether or not that is discombobulating, you decide. 🙂

Thank you for trying this. What I'm really concerned about is the checkout flow beyond the initial eBay process, i.e. whether it loops back in an intuitive and user-friendly way from Paypal, or whether the buyer is going to get bogged down in that part of the process and be either unwilling or unable to get back to the eBay cart to pay for the second lot. I'd still like to know from Raphael how that will look.

It's not surprising to me that the $USD item(s) come up first; I'd actually hope that would be the case, since .com is eBay's "go-to" site for buyers. Still, I don't know whether that will make listing in more than one currency a really good idea. Personally I think eBay should have just stuck with the lingua franca of world currency from the beginning.

I believe in the end it's a question of how much a seller whose market is primarily in the U.S. wants to risk any sort of buyer inconvenience or discomfort.

Experienced eBay buyers on .com will probably understand the principle of multiple payments and currencies, but newer buyers may be bamboozled or just plain irritated, and those are the ones I'd be concerned about. My buyer base these days is about 25% experienced, 50% newer, and the rest very new (0 to 10 FB). (I consider anyone with more than about 100 FB points fairly experienced).

I'd truly prefer to go back to listing on .ca exclusively, but I don't think this cart fix is going to be enough of a reason to return. It's more than ironic that the cart fix would finally give those of us who sell mainly to the U.S. the possibility of being competitive as Canadian sellers. But without $USD listings on .ca, it's of dubious value.

It will however, be very helpful for sellers who list only in $CDN on .ca and have a fairly evenly mixed seller base (US/Canadian/International). I've never been in that category, so unfortunately I always have to consider first and foremost what will best please and accommodate my U.S. buyers.

i.am.vivian · ‎11-14-2016

@rose-dee wrote:
What I'm really concerned about is the checkout flow beyond the initial eBay process, i.e. whether it loops back in an intuitive and user-friendly way from Paypal, or whether the buyer is going to get bogged down in that part of the process and be either unwilling or unable to get back to the eBay cart to pay for the second lot. I'd still like to know from Raphael how that will look.

I think I see what you mean. I can only tell you that after the buyer pays for the first USD lot, that is they CONFIRM payment and its done, the very next screen they see is the CDN items (or Euros or whatever else they are buying). Then it is just click to pay and confirm all over again.

You can try the experiment yourself. I did not go all the way and buy one from everything, like Euros, UK pounds, etc.

Buyers should have no trouble at all unless they are already having trouble and can't pay for the first USD lot. R on Weekly Chat will tell you the same thing.

I honestly don't think any of us needs to worry about new buyers not 'getting it'. I do not believe a buyer will decide against the second purchase. The reason is because proceeding is the easiest thing to do. To take the items out of the cart, to go back to Search, to retype items, to find something else, to go to another website, any of these things are a lot more work.

The easiest thing in the world is to just make 2 more clicks and have the rest of the items that they have already decided they want. Any other choice at all will take more effort, no matter how slight. Which makes sense when you think about it. EBay is never stupid when it comes to raking in more money.

For anyone who wants to make sure their items are paid for first, then list on DOT COM in USD. But for those who list in CDN, one nice thing is that when the buyer wants it enough to put it in their cart, at the checkout it will suddenly look a lot cheaper. 🙂

pjcdn2005 · ‎11-14-2016

You're right, the process to pay for a US $ transaction and then a Cdn one isn't difficult. A few weeks ago i did similar purchases in the .ca cart....easy peasy. The .com cart now works in the same way. I'm sure that 99.9% of the questions that any here has about the cart can be figured out by doing a little experimenting

raphael@ebay.com · ‎11-15-2016

Hi everyone, great discussion on the thread so far. A few points I'd like to make:

We don't generally make announcements for buyer-facing changes, as buyers don't really read them anyway and tend to adopt new flows organically. We may announce in cases where the buyer-facing changes are important to sellers, but this change in particular is on no interest at all to US sellers so the US announcement board is not an appropriate venue for this.

What we did to the US shopping cart is not new territory. The Canadian and Australian shopping carts, to only mention those two, have been working this way since their launch. We've never had to teach a buyer how to work through the checkout flow when they are buying items in different currencies in any of those markets, we don't anticipate having to educate US buyers for the same.

For the record, the reason we have to put buyers through one payment for each currency in their shopping cart is because of PayPal. It is impossible to make a single PayPal payment in more than one currency.

Any seller whose business model requires for them to list in USD are already listing on eBay.com and therefore this change doesn't affect them at all.

This change to the US shopping cart is in no way connected to the retirement of USD from our selling flows.

I can confidently say that Canada Post services will never be added to the list of shipping services on eBay.com. Not only Canadian sellers list directly on eBay.com, in fact, sellers from all over the world list on eBay.com. It would be impossible to include everyone's local shipping services and it would probably confuse everyone more than it would help a few, as US sellers are by far the largest group on eBay.com.

I hope this helps clarify some things.