Another case of not being able to combine shipping for US buyer

[2nd-time-around-jewelry]

I have another case of not being able to combine shipping for a US buyer who is interested in multiple items. This problem has been going on for way too long. It needs to be fixed once & for all. All the suggestions given me by eBay have not worked. We Canadians are losing a lot of sales this way.   I have all my preferences set correctly.  When they try to buy it still says Combined Shipping not offered by seller or Imediate Payment Required. They can add to cart but not request combined shipping total. And some buyers do not want to pay all the seperate shipping charges & then have me refund them. So I have decided to do it this way - They can pay for one item with correct shipping & I will change all the other items they want to free shipping on my listing before they buy them.

[momcqueen]

How do you have your Combined Shipping Rules set-up? Mine took a long time to get set right, like three years of fiddling before they worked as they should but now they're flawless. 

[2nd-time-around-jewelry]

If you have found a way for combined shipping to work then you have hit the jackpot. You should bottle it & sell the formula as I have not heard of other persons having success. As far as I know I have all my preferences set properly. Even Tyler tried to help by getting me to change preferences from US dollars to Canadian.

[pjcdn2005]

I assume that in site preferences (on both .ca and .com) you do have checked off that you allow combined shipping.  If you have that and indicate $c on .ca I don't know why they would be getting that message.  Was Tyler helping you with this particular transaction and he couldn't see anything that was causing the problem?

Btw this is not specifically a Canadian problem as some US sellers are having the same problem

but it it does seem to be sellers who have not set up any shipping rules. For sellers that sell a wide variety of items that are different sizes and weights it is very difficult to set up rules that work. It doesn't look like you have shipping rules set up now....have you tried to set any up?  I 'think' that in your situation it would be fairly easy to do since most of your items are in the 0-250 gr range. I haven't tried to do this on my listings as my items vary more in size and weight.

A couple of suggestions.....

As you list on .ca only you can easily use calculated shipping rather than the flat rates you are using now.  I believe that calculated shipping would automatically charge more based on the weight as items are added to the cart.  I doubt that you would be using boxes big enough to cause the dimensional shipping rates to be a factor so in theory, it should all work out.

Or,  since you are only charging shipping for the first item in this situation, you could leave shipping as a flat rate and then make a rule that states the buyer only pays shipping for the item that has the highest shipping cost.  Or add on a specific dollar amount for each item after the first one.  For example the first one would be the regular rate than $1 shipping for each item after that.   If you haven't already tried this, it's worth a try imo.  Then, there would be no need for the buyer to ask for an invoice.