@musicyouneed wrote:
My sales have also tanked. Part of why is what I sell, for what I am selling for and high shipping costs (doubled for the US). I think that it has to do more with the state of the economy, rents/mortgages are high, food costs are high, gas prices are high. I remember the same thing happened in 2007 - 2009. I was doing well from 2002 and then not. I think that there are just not the buyers on ebay as there was. The retail stores are empty except for the thrift stores, they are busy. I don't expect it to pick up the the rest of this year and into next year. I have been doing OK on facebook marketplace.
On a personal front sales totally tanked for the month of September. A total of 5 sales. 2 on the 11th and 2 on 23rd. Everything seems to be in waves if you can call 2 orders a wave. Majority sales as of late have been best offer with any additional offers that have shown up have been crazy lowball. 2% promotion gets next to nothing compared to when it was first offered. Small volume sellers cannot afford to use high promotion rates. Just how it is.
Because US buyers, unless they need something they can't find elsewhere they base their purchases on the shipping they are seeing. If the shipping seems to high they just go elsewhere. Important to note many US sellers are able to offer either free or very low shipping to US buyers. (Not the same choice to Canadian buyers.) When you throw in the competion and Prime makes it very difficult for us Canadian sellers to compete.
This showed up in my mail to today.:
Lower rates for southbound shipping with Tracked Packet™ to USA
Similar to Canada Post Expedited Lite for domestic shipments, Canadian sellers can now enjoy the benefits of the Canada Post Tracked Packet™– USA service at much lower rates.
Well and good if we had the capability to display this discounted rates. Very difficult when each shipping option has a different discount attached to it. We need the option to be able to show buyers discounted shipping to attract business so Canadian buers get/see the benefit vs the inflated counter rate. A note in the listing does not work that a discount "may or could" apply. It was mentioned a few months ago that this capability was in the works. I believe US sellers can do it. There has been crickets since on the subject on the Canadian side. Doesn't make it a very fair playing field until we can too.
devon@ebay
Is the option for Canadian sellers to show discounted rates coming to Canada anytime soon? This is a necessity. To give sellers access to these NON COUNTER rates but not be able to display them is extermely frustrating considering how long these rates have been in affect. Unfortunately all we seem to see is we'll look into these concerns with zero follow up.
-Lotz
To confirm this is still a problem, I checked 1 current listing where I have USA tracked as an option. As per calculated shipping displays as 16.01. As per the eBay email 6.35. A 10.00 difference that buyers DO NOT SEE.
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