eBay

block36 · ‎11-18-2025

My regular US postcards' buyer "asked seller for total" for 2 postcards in shopping cart and received the message ''Items involving vault, Authenticity Guarantee, or exports are not combinable and must be shipped separately''.

We both did not really understand it and did not know what to do, so she paid shipping for both cards and I have refunded her the excess.

Two days ago the buyer from Germany tried to buy 13 postcards using the cart and got the same message.

I could not ask her to pay the added shipping for 13 postcards, so I called eBay and was told that this is limitation caused by new International Shipping program and I have to opt out of it to allow shopping cart to work.

I opted out, buyer proceeded with the purchase and my package is on a way to Germany already.

Please advise IF THIS RESTRICTION WILL BE REMOVED ONE DAY or it is to stay.

Thank you

marnotom! · ‎11-18-2025

@block36 wrote:

Please advise IF THIS RESTRICTION WILL BE REMOVED ONE DAY or it is to stay.

None of us mere mortals are able to pierce the psyche of eBay staff, but consider that eBay International Shipping (eIS) has been a "thing" on the .com site and it operates pretty much the same way as the Canadian version, as far as I can tell.

My guess is that there are a couple of reasons why eIS-forwarded items can't be easily combined. One, if multiple items in the same order have different countries of origin, it makes it trickier to prepare customs manifests and calculate any duties that may be due on the receiving end (or the shipping end, if the item is subject to tariffs and headed for the US). Another reason may be that it's more difficult for the eIS bot to calculate a shipping rate from the hub to the item's destination as it may not have the information to work with on the combined order's shipping dimensions and weight.

At any rate, it's probably just as well that you opted out of the program as it's not really a good fit for what you sell. Looking at some of your completed listings, it appears that eIS would charge your US buyers about C$14 to ship a single postcard from the Mississauga hub, while German buyers would see a charge of about C$18.

I'm a bit confused about how you dealt with your US buyer, though. What were you refunding, exactly? Since you offer free domestic shipping, there wouldn't have been a shipping charge for the buyer to pay for the first leg of the postcards' journey. Any shipping they'd be paying would go directly to eIS, not you.

marnotom! · ‎11-18-2025

I should add that what some US sellers using the program do for a workaround is that they create a new, private listing with all the items that the buyer wishes to purchase from them (cancelling the individual listings first, I would assume). If the items are all similar (i.e. all postcards from one country and not a mix of postcards and other types of merchandise), they can be purchased and shipped as one order. This way, the eIS bot has accurate information to work with for the item's shipping dimensions and weight, and "knows" that the items have the same country of origin.