Hello Canadian eBayers,
Welcome to our mid-February weekly chat. Please go ahead and start posting at your convenience, we will join you at 1 PM Eastern as usual.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
Oh! I see. Thank you. I have a rather lengthy section of text on each and every one of my listings that explains all my policies and I was hoping that this new feature would streamline that. I realize other sellers were and are using templates but I'm working on a Mac and running Safari and most of the time I find compatibility issues with third-party software (as in it is not supported) so I didn't bother to try that route. I'll look into it. Thanks again.
Business Policies aren't meant to fully replace your seller terms as you put them in your listing descriptions. It's more of a way to create and save custom shipping, returns and payment policies that you can recall on the listings for which they are more appropriate (ass opposed to have to program all these parameters for each listing individually like today). For example, if you had items that you only offer tonCanadian buyers and other items that you offer worldwide, you could have 2 shipping policies saved (Policy 1 with only domestic shipping and Policy 2 with worldwide shipping) and when you list, you would assign shipping Policy 1 or Policy 2 instead of setting up all the shipping services each time. Another example is if you used more than 1 PayPal account to get paid, you could assign the different payment policies to different listings.
With that said, it would still be a good idea to explain what your sale terms are in the listing description.
One other point: although the .ca cart should work for all countries if one happens to log onto .ca, how many prospective buyers actually go to eBay.ca first, and not eBay.com?
I have to admit that even when I occasionally buy on eBay, I generally start on .com because of the greater product spectrum. So the question is: if eBay knew they had a working cart on .com, why not simply use the same functionality for .ca?
I'm sorry, but these "workaround" suggestions do nothing for me but tell me that eBay really doesn't give a hoot about Canadian sellers and would rather make us feel that we're responsible for perpetuating the problems if we don't use the workarounds. Very sad indeed. 
@rose-dee wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
Raphael, this sounds clear-cut, but in practice it is not:
1) "If a Canadian seller listed their items on eBay.com instead, then this problem goes away and US buyers can use the shopping cart to combine items." This sounds like eBay shifting the onus of a very serious technical issue onto Canadian sellers. Yes, we could all list on .com, certainly, but then what would be the point of having a .ca site?
2) I simply don't understand why the cart was introduced on .ca at all until eBay was certain it would be fully compatible for U.S. buyers, since they are the majority of many Cdn sellers' customers. Why on earth would the Cdn cart have been "built differently" to be compatible with all other countries, but not with the U.S.? To me, that defies rationality.
3) "...the seller can tell them to go make their purchase on eBay.ca instead..." Yes, this is a lovely solution on the face of it, but in my experience, I've had only one U.S. customer actually contact me to ask what they should do. How many other potential buyers have just given up and gone away -- perhaps forever? This so-called solution, once again, shifts the onus of responsibility for making a seriously flawed (and yet critical) feature work properly, onto the buyers and sellers, rather than onto eBay where the problem began and where it should end.
Can you really blame many of us for being very angry about this?
1) As I explained before, only CA sellers who list on eBay.ca AND offer combined shipping discounts on BIN items end up in a situations where buyers on eBay.com cannot get their orders combined. I don't have the actual number on hand, but that's a surprisingly low number of sellers, and certainly not all Canadian. The eBay.ca site certainly still has very good reasons to exist (not to mention killing it it would put all your favourite eBay Canada employees, including me, out of a job).
2) Based on the figure I outlined above, what you have to understand is that even with its incompatibility with non-eBay.com items, the US shopping cart works just fine on 99% of sales that happen on eBay.com. And once again, there are no such issues with the shopping cart on eBay.ca. The shopping cart on eBay.ca works for any items, for any buyer.
3) I never claimed that a CA seller would be able to magically be able to warn all their US buyers ahead of them trying to buy their items. I never even called this a solution. I feel there is value, however, in offering what I think is the right thing to say to a buy who contacts you, should anyone reading this find themselves in this situation.
And I'm not blaming anyone for the way they feel about this, I have even repeatedly agreed that it was a huge pain point that we are actively working to make better. For now though, all we have to offer a re work arounds.
Speaking of work arounds, your business model in particular lends itself perfectly two simple solutions. You don't use calculated shipping and your items have generally a low shipping cost. Why not simply adjust your sale price to make everything free shipping? None of your buyers would then miss out on combined shipping. Alternatively, you could keep your flat rate shipping exactly the same as it is today, but list on eBay.com instead. Either way, this would fully resolve the issues you have with any eBay shopping cart.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
This explanation of the shopping cart flaw speaks against my own selling experiences with it: UK buyers who are logged into ebay.co.uk and trying to buy from me on ebay.ca are unable to combine shipping no matter what they do. How can it be an exclusively ebay.com cart problem? Or has this very recently changed? Because it was a big mess spread all over my desk more than once as recently as Christmas.
If a buyer is logged into eBay.co.uk, they are using the UK cart not the CA one. UK buyers who come to eBay.ca and log in there can totally use the CA cart and combine items this way. I never made any comments about the UK shopping cart, I don't know much about that one.
@rose-dee wrote:
One other point: although the .ca cart should work for all countries if one happens to log onto .ca, how many prospective buyers actually go to eBay.ca first, and not eBay.com?
I have to admit that even when I occasionally buy on eBay, I generally start on .com because of the greater product spectrum. So the question is: if eBay knew they had a working cart on .com, why not simply use the same functionality for .ca?
I'm sorry, but these "workaround" suggestions do nothing for me but tell me that eBay really doesn't give a hoot about Canadian sellers and would rather make us feel that we're responsible for perpetuating the problems if we don't use the workarounds. Very sad indeed.
rose-dee - the .ca shopping cart works for everyone. The .com shopping cart only works for items listed on eBay.com.
As for the buyer base who uses eBay.ca, well, it's growing actually. Even amongst US buyers.
@rose-dee wrote:
@mjwl2006 wrote:
This explanation of the shopping cart flaw speaks against my own selling experiences with it: UK buyers who are logged into ebay.co.uk and trying to buy from me on ebay.ca are unable to combine shipping no matter what they do.
'mjwl' -- This is exactly what will happen when any buyer logged onto an eBay site other than eBay.ca tries to make a multiple purchase from a Canadian seller, which is why we're all so concerned about this problem. Obviously U.S. buyers are the biggest issue, but I've had the same thing occur with U.K. too.
How can it be an exclusively ebay.com cart problem?
It's not at all. The problem that all of us are having, and that we're trying to get eBay to fix, is with buyers from other countries (i.e. logged onto anything but .ca) being able to use the .ca cart. The problem, in short, is the faulty programming in the eBay.ca cart, which in my view should never have been introduced in the first place if it couldn't be proven to be fully compatible across other eBay sites. After all, eBay is one of the biggest online venues in the world, you would think it could have worked out the checkout process after all these years.
Sorry to intervene here, but this is the #1 issue I have with eBay at the moment!
I'm sorry but I have to correct you here because what you are saying is grossly untrue and frankly, makes little sense.
In order to use the shopping cart on a specific eBay site, a buyer has to be logged into that same eBay site. If you're logged into eBay.com, you'll see and be able to use the .com shopping cart. If you're logged into eBay.ca, it'll be the .ca shopping cart.
The eBay.ca shopping cart has no issues. No faulty programming. Neither does the eBay.com shopping cart. I've explained this many, many times.
At the end of the day, you are free to use the solutions I offered or not. They would work perfectly for you, with very minimal effort on your part, but I can't force you to use them.
I'm going to have to stop discussing this topic any further with you as I've said everything I had to say.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
I see. I misunderstood your comment to mean that the .ca cart was compatible with buyers from other countries regardless of where they were logged in unless that place was ebay.com. I suppose it is impossible then to hope that one day all carts/bags/baskets will work seamlessly together. It is rather difficult to explain to buyers in Dutch or Italian that I can and do combine postage and charge no handling fees but that I am offering refunds on the overcharges. (Not to mention the hours of additional paperwork that creates after the fact.)
Thank you for your insight and time. I realize Board Hour is over.
If your business model allows you to list your items on eBay.com instead, it would at least solve your combined shipping problem for any buyer who uses eBay.com.
@rose-dee wrote:
Again, what I would really like eBay to say is that they are working on solving these egregious problems with an essential part of the online purchasing process, and tell us when it will be resolved (an estimate would be just fine).
We have said these things already, and explained at length why there is no ETA yet, even estimated.
This concludes our shopping cart discussion weekly chat for today 🙂
Thanks for participating and see you next week!
