@recped wrote:
@mjwl2006 wrote:
"....more products are bought from US sellers by Canadian buyers that (sic) from Canadian sellers."
I highly doubt it.
Really? I can only speak for myself and my friends. Personally I have only bought from 2 or 3 Canadian sellers out of several hundred purchases. I'm not sure any of my friends who buy on eBay have ever bought from a Canadian seller (on eBay).
I often start my buying searches on .ca with Canada Only selected....search results are frequently ZERO matches, when I open it up to US or Worldwide sellers I get dozens or hundreds or even thousands of matches.
I sometimes do find the items I'm looking for from Canadian sellers but in many cases the pricing is terrible.
I think you're right about this. Of course eBay will never give us the stats. In my own experience of buying on eBay over about 15 years, I've probably only found what I wanted on the right terms from a Canadian seller a handful of times. I mostly do what you do -- try to search by location set to Canada first, but rarely find what I'm looking for. I expect a lot of Canadian buyers don't even bother to do that, just choose the best option from the default (worldwide) list presented by eBay.
This tends to also confirm my experience in over 8 years of selling on eBay, where I've yet to crack the 5% threshold of sales to Canadian buyers, despite trying free shipping to Canada for quite some time. It made no difference at all.
I will be among the exodus, not because I don't think I could sell to my 95% U.S. customer base if I listed in $Cdn, but because there are just too many other reasons now to not list on .ca in $Cdn.
This is where I do disagree with your earlier point that what currency we use is irrelevant to anyone. It makes a big difference to me that listing in $US keeps my prices fixed in line with those of my U.S. competitors. That will no longer be possible to do if listing on .ca in $CDN. It also makes an enormous difference to me that the checkout/cart system and automated discounts work seamlessly for my buyers if I list in $USD on .com. I've had more multi-item sales in the last 6 months than I had in the more than 2-1/2 years I was listing on .ca in $US and suffering from the dysfunctional cart system.
As for eBay itself, it will make a difference to them if more Canucks move to .com They will be making more money in FVFs from 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.
This strategy worked beautifully for me on .ca for quite some time because I often had items that involved expensive shipping to the U.S., on which I paid $0 in FVFs because my Canadian shipping was set to "free". However, I've sadly had to forfeit that perk -- and face the higher costs -- in order to ensure that my (primarily U.S.) customers can actually check out and pay for their purchases. Moving to .com was the lesser of two evils for me.
Obviously for a seller whose sales are more evenly divided between U.S. and Canadian buyers (or who knows for certain they sell mainly to Canadians), this won't be such a concern.
