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Hello Canadian eBayers! This week Bryan and I will be answering your questions and reading your comments. Rodney and Kalvin may also join the conversation a bit later.
Start posting at any time, we will start replying at the top of the hour.
Good afternoon
Much has been written on these boards by Canadians about how eBay's Global Shipping Program (GSP) negatively affects most transactions.
Now, I suspect eBay initiated the program with Pitney Bowes with full knowledge of the possible repercutions, expecting benefits for everyone leading to more business all around.
Since we seem to only see the negative aspects of the program, could you please invest some time in outlining to your readers the possible positive effects of GSP for Canadian buyers.
The negatives are well known:
1) excessive fees by Pitney Bowes
2) two shipping charges built into the program - one from the seller to Pitney Bowes and a second one from Pitney Bowes to the Canadian buyer
3) taxes being charged on all transactions when it is well understood than a large number of relatively low value imports (say up to $50) generally come through the postal service without any tax being levied, also avoiding the cost of brokerage fee in the process.
4) obvious delay for most transactions since two shipments are involved
5) lack of clarity (to be polite) when it comes to the charges from Pitney Bowes - how much is handling fee?, brokerage? taxes? rate? extra shipping? more fees? etc...
6) what is the HST registration number allowing PB to charge the tax. Such information is required by buyers who are GST/HST registered sellers claiming ITCs. There is also a legal requirements for PB to provide such information.
What are the positive aspects as far as Canadian buyers are concerned?
Beside the usual blah blah blah, could you provide specific and detailed examples, including dollars and cents, to show benefits to Canadians.
Good afternoon
Much has been written on these boards by Canadians about how eBay's Global Shipping Program (GSP) negatively affects most transactions.
Now, I suspect eBay initiated the program with Pitney Bowes with full knowledge of the possible repercutions, expecting benefits for everyone leading to more business all around.
Since we seem to only see the negative aspects of the program, could you please invest some time in outlining to your readers the possible positive effects of GSP for Canadian buyers.
The negatives are well known:
1) excessive fees by Pitney Bowes
2) two shipping charges built into the program - one from the seller to Pitney Bowes and a second one from Pitney Bowes to the Canadian buyer
3) taxes being charged on all transactions when it is well understood than a large number of relatively low value imports (say up to $50) generally come through the postal service without any tax being levied, also avoiding the cost of brokerage fee in the process.
4) obvious delay for most transactions since two shipments are involved
5) lack of clarity (to be polite) when it comes to the charges from Pitney Bowes - how much is handling fee?, brokerage? taxes? rate? extra shipping? more fees? etc...
6) what is the HST registration number allowing PB to charge the tax. Such information is required by buyers who are GST/HST registered sellers claiming ITCs. There is also a legal requirements for PB to provide such information.
What are the positive aspects as far as Canadian buyers are concerned?
Beside the usual blah blah blah, could you provide specific and detailed examples, including dollars and cents, to show benefits to Canadians.
Bonjour pierrelebel,
Obviously we are well aware that the current iteration of the Global Shipping Program isn't advantageous for most Canadian buyers. Short of applying changes to help make more GSP transactions relevant to Canadians (something we're actively working on), there are a few workarounds US sellers can employ to mitigate the problem. For example, they can offer an alternative to GSP for shipping into Canada or create non-GSP listings specific to the Canadian market.
With that said, the GSP program has proven to be somewhat advantageous to Canadian buyers for items with a high sale price, which buyers are already expecting a somewhat high shipping price and import charges for. For those items, GSP helps both expedite the border crossing process as well as open up inventory from US sellers whom otherwise might not offer shipping to Canada.
Quiet morning.
I have nothing prepared for this weekly session but I am monitoring the discussion today.
I would like to comment on the number of times an eBay employee has replied to topics in these forums in the past week or two. It is nice to have someone from eBay reading and caring about some of the concerns of eBay Canada buyers and sellers.
Hi pocomocomputing,
Thanks for the kind words. We're all happy to visit the forums more often and engage with you guys more.
Hi,
I've reviewed the first URL and not sure if this applicable to Canada. The second item is not new, the seller has indicated they haven’t specified shipping to Canada in the post - thus buyers are not able to complete the transition and M2M'ing the sellers. The reason they appear for Canadian shoppers would be on the ebay.com allows sellers that are in the US and have no specified shipping to appear in the search results unlike on ebay.ca which filters those listings.
Please repeat your question that are you are waiting on a response.
Bryan
In the second URL, seller did send buyer an invoice with shipping to Canada; yet buyer is unable to pay?
Lat weeks question was about buyer's not being able to checkout (getting error code 70026) after seller refunded.
Sorry my questions are unrelated to my own issues. I am trying to help others.
Unless something recently changed, if a seller has an alternative shipping method in their listing, the GSP countries can not see it. They can only see the GSP option.
My bad, you are right. This is actually something we're trying to change.
Some posted that they got an email or phone call stating that these forums would be changing.
What is this about? What are the changes? When will this be happening?
There will be upgrades made to the Community platform over the coming weeks, mostly just the look & feel will change, the structure will remain the same for the Discussion Forums, Answer Centre and Groups. We will soon post an official announcement with a link for you guys to see what the new platform will look like.
Bulk edit appears to have glitches.
Sellers are complaining that they are being charged for the odd listings when relisting a few when they should not be.
I know that in the past when I have bulk edited UnSold listings and scheduled them, occasionally on or two would list immediately and not be scheduled. This happened a few times in the past for me.
Is eBay aware that bulk edit is glitchy? I have no specific examples of this.
Thanks for flagging this. Unfortunately unless we run into a specific example allowing us to reproduce the problem, it's impossible to investigate and fix it. Whoever encounters such problems should promptly report them to CS with all the relevant data, item numbers affected, steps to reproduce, cpu and software versions, etc.
In the second URL, seller did send buyer an invoice with shipping to Canada; yet buyer is unable to pay?
Lat weeks question was about buyer's not being able to checkout (getting error code 70026) after seller refunded.
Sorry my questions are unrelated to my own issues. I am trying to help others.
Buyer not able to pay question - Not sure about this one. Need more details to check into it.
70023 - Can we get the ITEM number for the listing?
Bryan
"with a link for you guys to see what the new platform will look like."
Will the new platform still be administered and monitored by LiveWorld?
"with a link for you guys to see what the new platform will look like."
Will the new platform still be administered and monitored by LiveWorld?
No. eBay has terminated the contract with LiveWorld.
