eBay

musicyouneed · ‎10-09-2016

Buyer works with app and wants to make multiple purchases from both .com and .ca and stated that since he work on app all the time, I can't find all your product on the main site. (not exactly as he wrote but you get the drift)

What do I tell him? I told him to go to .ca but he on on an app.

musicyouneed · ‎10-09-2016

I phoned him and walked him through, sent him links to my store on .ca and then .com. He purchased 9 CD's of .ca and 6 off .com so it was worth it.

pjcdn2005 · ‎10-09-2016

I'm glad that it worked out and that he didn't get frustrated and give up.

musicyouneed · ‎10-09-2016

US repeat buyer. I lost a big sale a couple of months ago to him, he uses a tablet with an ebay app and he has a physical disease that makes typing on a tablet a problem, he gets frustrated. Ebay just doesn't realize that ebay isn't that user friendly when you have handicaps and you are trying to buy with 2 different currencies over 2 different sites. I walked him through it over the phone, sent him links to my store both on .com and .ca. When he saw the Canadian $ amount as $99, he was really confused and upset, I explained that it is only about $74 US. The buyer explained that he doesn't want to know what it is in Canadian $, he only wants to know what it is in US dollars.

Also what he sees when he looks at my store on a tablet is different from what I see. He told me that he couldn't see my categories, I don't have a tablet so I can't see what he sees.

Ebay needs to fix the cart issue and make it easier for buyers to purchase items, that is the way to make money. Forget about all these new listing forms etc. fix the items that need fixing first.

pjcdn2005 · ‎10-09-2016

I see your store categories on my mini iPad but I must be using the classic site. I've never downloaded the eBay app.

pocomocomputing · ‎10-09-2016

eBay.com USA view of cart issue (and maybe ebay.ca Canada too) is that there is no issue at all. Sellers should list on one site only for the majority of their items from their point of view.

Canadian sellers list on both sites only because they can get the same amount of free listings on each site. If they could not get the perk of the same amount of free listings on eBay.com, the Canadian seller would have to list only on eBay.ca.

I suspect that the free listings that a non-store and a store seller gets will only apply to one site in the next year or so. A Canadian seller would have to choose which site is their main site for their free listings. Or perhaps the free listings for a store would have to be on the site the store is on.

This is what I would do if I were eBay.com USA who must be tired of Canadian sellers seemingly whining so much over the years. Canadian sellers complain about the high cost of shipping into the USA to compete with USA sellers when Canadians are shipping internationally into the USA while domestic USA sellers are shipping domestically to their USA buyers. Canadian sellers get TRS discount extremely easy compared to USA sellers. We had the perk of listing in USA dollars for years which was just taken away. Why should eBay.ca Canada sellers get advantages over USA sellers?

Then there is the GSP issue that Canadian buyers complain so much about (rightfully). eBay.com USA must really be tired of Canadian buyers and sellers.

PS Now do not jump all over me for this post. I am just posting some thoughts on what the eBay.com USA view of Canadian buyers and sellers..

rose-dee · ‎10-09-2016

@musicyouneed wrote:
US repeat buyer. I lost a big sale a couple of months ago to him, he uses a tablet with an ebay app and he has a physical disease that makes typing on a tablet a problem, he gets frustrated. Ebay just doesn't realize that ebay isn't that user friendly when you have handicaps and you are trying to buy with 2 different currencies over 2 different sites. I walked him through it over the phone, sent him links to my store both on .com and .ca. When he saw the Canadian $ amount as $99, he was really confused and upset, I explained that it is only about $74 US. The buyer explained that he doesn't want to know what it is in Canadian $, he only wants to know what it is in US dollars.

Also what he sees when he looks at my store on a tablet is different from what I see. He told me that he couldn't see my categories, I don't have a tablet so I can't see what he sees.

Ebay needs to fix the cart issue and make it easier for buyers to purchase items, that is the way to make money. Forget about all these new listing forms etc. fix the items that need fixing first.

You have just outlined very clearly an example of the three biggest and most frustrating issues I have with eBay's management of its site(s): Lack of consistency across sites/platforms, a totally flawed checkout system, and eBay's decision to remove $USD listings from .ca.

It's inconceivable to me why eBay doesn't focus on the buyer-friendliness of its sites rather than forever re-arranging the digital furniture. The dysfunctional checkout/cart has been going on for at least 2 years and is presumably low on eBay's priority list because it's seen to affect only Canadian sellers. But that's not quite true. It affects U.S. buyers. It also, as I understand it, affects other eBay platforms, such as the UK site.

You absolutely made the best decision in phoning your buyer, and I'm happy it worked out well for you. My real problem with the issues you mentioned is wondering how many buyers have tried, failed, given up and gone elsewhere to buy, including sites with more seamless access and checkout. As you say, your buyer had given up once before. For some reason this is something eBay doesn't appear to consider significant.

ypdc_dennis · ‎10-09-2016

@pocomocomputing wrote:
eBay.com USA view of cart issue (and maybe ebay.ca Canada too) is that there is no issue at all. Sellers should list on one site only for the majority of their items from their point of view.
...
PS Now do not jump all over me for this post. I am just posting some thoughts on what the eBay.com USA view of Canadian buyers and sellers..

If you don't want to be jumped, don't post...

The carts that have combining issues are the USA and the UK ebay sites. So if the rest of eBay can work, why don't those two? Is it GSP related?

On another point, why do you assume that eBay HQ staff even know that eBay.CA exists, let alone have an opinion about Canadians.

-..-

rose-dee · ‎10-09-2016

@pocomocomputing wrote:

PS Now do not jump all over me for this post. I am just posting some thoughts on what the eBay.com USA view of Canadian buyers and sellers..

I'm not going to jump all over your comments, because everything you say does makes sense -- except... all of these issues beg the question: "why have an eBay.ca site at all"? If eBay (still presumably the world's biggest online marketplace) can't make it work seamlessly with the rest of its sites, why bother?

At some point in the past it no doubt made sense for eBay to attract Canadian sellers who had never heard of or tried selling on eBay by creating a specifically Canadian site with special advantages.

But now? I don't know. When eBay took away the ability to list in $USD, this made it senseless for a lot of us who sell primarily to the U.S. to continue to list on .ca. Perhaps this was deliberate on eBay's part, as a means of beginning to phase out .ca altogether. Basically for sellers like me, it means the .ca free listings and promos are now virtually useless anyway.

In the past few years some of the other perquisites on .ca have also been removed, . Remember the brouhaha by U.S. sellers over the special treatment Canadian sellers got over the "tracking" numbers that really weren't, and how that made getting US-TRS-Plus so much easier for Canadians? The Canadian staffing has been pared down almost to the point of irrelevancy.

So I agree with you that I wouldn't be surprised to see eBay force sellers to choose one site over the other. They've practically done that already, with the switch to $CDN-only listings.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised to see eBay.ca disappear altogether. Why bother to fix a checkout system on a site that they plan to retire? What really frustrates me is that I wish they'd just get on with it if that's the plan. Allowing a broken checkout system to drag on for years is outrageous. They wasted time and money redesigning a Canadian checkout cart that is now incompatible with .com. Ridiculous.

Frankly, it's amazing that any of us manage to hang on and continue selling with any success. Personally I think that speaks more for Canadian sellers' ingenuity and determination than it does for eBay's intelligence in managing its sites in the best interests of its users.

silverpinups · ‎10-09-2016

eBay.ca is a sinking ship.... and will be eventually absorbed by eBay.com.

They are never going to fix the shopping cart issue and ebay.ca sellers will have mark shipping at 0.00 in order to combine purchases from both sites.

eBay.ca changed to one currency to "test" the waters to see if they are self reliant in the eBay marketplace.