K!~~_7.JPG "bunbar"){kind=avatar}
Hello everyone,
Welcome to our weekly chat. As it is now common, the thread will remain open for the next 24 hours or so, to help those who couldn't make it during the day.
Open issues:
- Errors when uploading more than one tracking number at a time (repeated, erroneous numbers saved)
Updates:
- Printer friendly Order Details page missing items - Resolved - fix to roll out soon.
- Odd missing gallery picture in search results - There was a general bug fix that was supposed to address this. Will now remove it from the list, if anyone still has that happen to their listings please let me know.
- FVF on shipping charged on international sales even when there was free domestic shipping - Resolved
- Selling limits live items count discrepancy - We are investigating further.
- Missing Tracked Packet destinations - still no update from PayPal and Pitney Bowes
- Combined shipping offers not shown to international buyers - ticket open
If anything is missing, please let me know. Thanks!
@rose-dee wrote:
Hi Raphael, sorry I'm late to the chat this week.
I recently had a buyer message me directly to say that she'd been unable to use the "Request Total from Seller" button when checking out. Apparently she got an error message along the lines of: "This seller doesn't offer combined shipping discounts", which is completely untrue in my case.
She was in the U.S., buying 2 $US items on .com. I usually will offer lower (combined) shipping on 2 or more items, but I need to know the size, weight and thickness of the items in order to provide the buyer with an accurate shipping amount. (I do offer free shipping for 4 or more items, but that is set up as an automated discount, which is completely separate and different).
Do you know what's going on there? If the "Request Total" button is on the checkout page, it should allow buyers to do just that.
BTW, I had precisely the same problem in purchasing from a U.K. seller. I had to back out and message directly.
Also, leaving this issue in place clearly benefits eBay, since in my case as seller, I had to tell the buyer to purchase the 2 items, pay the total shipping, and I'd calculate the actual shipping and refund -- i.e. FVFs for eBay on the excess shipping.
Hi rose-dee,
I'm not aware of any issues with the Request Total button, but I'm happy to look into it. Can you send me the item numbers your buyer was trying to request total for? Thanks.
@rose-dee wrote:
Although no doubt eBay is sick of hearing from upset Canadians about the change to $CDN-only listings on .ca, I feel obliged to add my voice to the crowd.
This change -- together with the continuing US cart disconnect -- has basically destroyed a successful business plan and selling strategy that I built up for years on eBay. What stings especially is the thought that this move will benefit eBay's cash flow in a very surreptitious way that many Cdn sellers who feel forced to move to .com will not realize. I don't mind being told upfront that I have to pay more to sell here. But I do mind feeling a knife quietly being stuck in my back.
So my question is this: is the following true or false?
"It will make a difference to eBay if more Canucks move to .com They will be making more money in FVFs from Canadian sellers like me on practically every sale because it will no longer be reasonable for a Canadian seller listing on .com who has mainly U.S. buyers to use free domestic shipping (which on .com is actually shipping to the U.S.) in order to avoid FVFs on shipping elsewhere."
It is true that Canadian sellers who decide to move their listings to eBay.com will have to rethink their shipping strategy in order to avoid paying more FVF on shipping than they were when listing on eBay.ca.
@rose-dee wrote:
@pocomocomputing wrote:
Buying and selling on eBay is successful despite their idiotic moves and glitchy services but is getting harder and harder to buy or sell on eBay.
The "glitchy services" part of your comment caught my attention. This is something I want to add as well, from the point of view of a buyer. Recently, while searching for some items to buy, I almost gave up on eBay completely, due to the jerky, slow, never-ending loading of pages, which I suspect is due to all the ads with moving content that eBay now places on its various pages.
It's beyond annoying, to the point of exasperation, and I wonder how other buyers (including my own) put up with it. It's almost that a buyer has to persist through hurdles in order to get a look at what they want. Just terrible from a potential buyer's point of view. Now I know it's not my laptop's problem, as it's fairly new, running Windows 10, and has no loading/viewing problems on other sites that don't run live ads.
So my question to Raphael is whether eBay is aware these ubiquitous live, jumpy, memory-hungry ads may be actually putting their own customers off? Not to mention that eBay is showing them other places to shop for items that may be available on eBay. Clearly eBay profits from selling advertising space to outsiders, but at the cost of its own customers? Why not feature or advertise your own sellers all over those pages?
I can't speak to the page load speeds with regards to ads. Personally, and I buy quite a bit, I haven't noticed this to be a nuisance. When it comes to ads strategy and why we allow them on our pages, that's above my pay grade I'm afraid. I wish I could comment on this better.
Perhaps I can suggest installing an ad blocker plug in on your browser?
@tch_ca wrote:
So Raphael,
Now that you've pretty much "skated" on every concern posted by just about everyone here this week, and provided no solutions other than "suck it up"....I ask again....What will Ebay Canada be doing to compensate the Canadian sellers for this enormous screw up and what staffing changes will Andrea be making to make sure this classic example of lack of leadership and project management does not occur again? What high school developer designed the tool? Who managed the process? Will Ebay ever stop disregarding it's selling community? Will Ebay ever become a responsible corporate citizen and listen to it's SUBSCRIBERS and their needs?
Sadly due to the nature of my listings and the different content rules between Ebay.com and Ebay.ca, I still put up with listing some of my items on Ebay.ca. I will be here every week Raphael, posing the same questions and concerns until Ebay rectifies the wrong it consistently causes it's sellers.
As I told another member, I appreciate that you're unhappy with what is happening, but with all due respect, you're asking questions to which I obviously can't answer. Surely you know that as you write those questions. We do not discuss internal company matters on a public forum. If you have recommendations on how we could "right the wrong," please share them and I'll pass them along like any other recommendations I get on these chat sessions. Thanks.
@rose-dee wrote:
Um... dare I ask?
This may be utterly coincidental, but I haven't sold a single item that is listed in $US on .ca for weeks now. Lots of $US listings on .com have sold during the same time period.
Is eBay somehow "downgrading" our remaining $USD listings on .ca through search/best match, etc. etc., so that they are less likely to sell, thus reinforcing the need to remove them from .ca? I've never, in all the years of selling on eBay, had this phenomenon occur (no $USD .ca listings selling at all).
We aren't doing anything to deliberately penalize any of our sellers' sales, unless prescribed by our policies (for example, if a seller becomes Below Standard).
@bunbar wrote:
I would still like to know why the migration tool doesn't relist the amount of items you actually have. When you list a LOT of items before you find this out there is no way to fix it unless you go back and check each item one at a time
When I first started listing on ebay there was no .ca only .com. When .CA started they wanted us to use their site so they kept offering Canadians free listings only if they listed on the .CA site. So I slowly started listed my new items there. I don't understand how listing in CDN dollars sells better since what ever country you are looking from, it shows the money from your country
We should have one more update to address this in the next few days. I'll announce when the time comes.
@rose-dee wrote:
(Umm, I presume that your answer means that the statement in bold above is true, i.e. eBay will be making more money off us as a result of herding us over to .com).
Technically this is true, but I need to specify that the resulting revenue is not nearly significant enough to be a driving factor in our decision to retire USD from our selling flows.Out of the whole Canadian seller base, the portion that will end up moving their listings to eBay.com as a result of the USD retirement is only a very tiny fraction. The much larger majority is either already listing in CAD or listing on eBay.com.
rose-dee wrote:Sadly for us, there really is no strategy on .com that doesn't involve monetary loss, one way or the other, for those of us whose primary customer base is in the U.S.
The choice is to either offer completely free shipping and pay the high cost of shipping to the U.S. on every item, or list with actual or reasonable shipping and lose money in FVFs on every transaction.
So I can't see that there is any "strategy" open to us that will actually cut these losses. If you have one to suggest, I'd be overjoyed to hear it.
I do have an alternate strategy to propose. Why not try listing in CAD on eBay.ca? That solves the FVF on shipping problem and allows you to benefit from better tailored selling tools for a Canadian seller.
@merritt-motorcycle-salvage wrote:
I was under the assumption that the Migration Tool would add flat rate shipping costs to drafts created on ebay.com gathered from calculated shipping costs on original listings from .ca. A seller has to manually add or calculate to determine how much to charge for flat rate shipping or add to item costs to have free shipping. It would be possible if the original weights were carried over in metric, and the dimensions do not carry over at all let alone in metric. A seller would be able to at least look at the old weight / dimensions in metric on .com draft and use this information to determine flat rate shipping costs since Canadian calculated shipping is of course not available on .com. One has to manually go back and forth with items of various sizes and weights to consider. This is beyond time consuming. We need more time, there is no question about it. Also "Item Condition" does not get carried over when created drafts on .com.
Originally, for listings that use calculated shipping, we intended to have the tool select the closest equivalent flat rate shipping service but we never said we could also figure out the shipping cost on behalf of the seller. That would be impossible, besides we couldn't arbitrarily make such a decision on behalf of sellers. I've maintained from the beginning that sellers who rely on calculated shipping rates should really consider staying on eBay.ca specifically because of the difficulties that come with figuring our flat rate shipping when listing on eBay.com. Then, when we developed the tool, we ran into unforeseen limitations that prevent drafts from being created if a flat rate shipping service is selected but no cost is input. At that point we had to make the call to leave the shipping service blank as well, otherwise we were required to make an arbitrary call on what flat rate cost to input on behalf of the seller, risking that some end up publishing listings with that arbitrary cost without noticing. No need to explain why we couldn't do that.
I agree with you that it would have been preferable to carry over weights and dimensions in their original format, but metric isn't supported on eBay.com so we couldn't.
Item condition - I am pretty sure I personally tested for that and that it works, or at least, worked. If you could provide an item number for a listing from which the resulting draft didn't keep the item condition, it would greatly help me get that fixed.
@musicyouneed wrote:
Raphael, Thanks I was able to change that. Is there a way to only limit it to the US buyers and not the international, re promotional shipping.?
I don't think the promotional shipping discounts can distinguish between US and International shipping.
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