We've found posts on ebay Canada Community that go back to the end of October of 2017 which state a seller noticed this problem with the ebay Canada Shipping Calculator where it won't show postage choices on the Item Listing page for destinations outside Canada that started earlier in the month. (This is not official, mind you.) Sellers on the French side of ebay Canada had been reporting a problem similar to this since the summer. Are they all the same problem? Different variations of the same problem? Are some user-generated problems? Only slightly-related problems? A hybrid of two problems? We don't exactly know.
Another thing we don't know is the reason this is taking as long to fix as it has been broken. Calculated Shipping is a fundamental tool for ebay.ca sellers. If you as a seller are experiencing problems as a result of this broken tool, please add your voice to the Weekly Chat with ebay staff (overnight Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning) and/or call ebay Customer Service to add your user ID to the ticket opened for this 'bug'.
What we do know is that there are workaround options. There are two ways to compensate for this which users have found to be successful for themselves and other users have confirmed it also works for them. A third is a drastic shift to how you might calculate postage for your listings but, theoretically, one you wouldn't have to un-do once this problem is finally fixed.
1. Tell your buyers to Add to Cart to check postage costs for Fixed Price listings. OR
2. Remove Air Parcel service* from Auctions to see the other postage costs displayed properly for USA and international destinations. Of course, this will leave buyers in countries served by Air Parcel with no easy way to checkout if they buy something from you until you manually invoice them.
3. Switch to flat-rate shipping which is a method many sellers on ebay Canada and Canadian sellers from Canada on ebay.com use anyway.
*For whatever odd reason, the glitch seems to be tied specifically to Air Parcel, and possibly also the less-used Surface Parcel. I can tell you, however, that if you attempt to (temporarily) remove Air Parcel (or Surface Parcel) from listings as your workaround, please note that doing so via Bulk Edit will not actually save the changes.
This is a bug with the Bulk Editor; I've experienced this phenomena in the past with bulk editor bulk changes to international postage options, you can make the changes but they won't take. (It's been like this for probably two to three years, luckily I have few reasons to do a massive bulk edit of that field of data.) You have to make the changes via old fashioned Revise Item one at a time, or using Bulk Editor but selecting the items Edit Listings Individually. Of course, if you have items of varying sizes/valued selected, you might want to do it that way anyway.
Any of the ways that you chose as a workaround, it presents a very time-consuming effort. And likely one that is not ideal if you rely on sales to countries served only by Air Parcel, or don't want to long-term pay the cost of adding Fixed Price upgrades to your running Auctions. And one you'd need to undo when the Shipping Calculator is fixed. With a switch to flat-rate, however, you might decide to stick it out that way after all the work is done.
For now, I'm merely removing Air Parcel service from my Auctions only, as Add to Cart for Buy It Now (BIN) format listings shows postage as it should for international buyers looking to purchase BIN items. If you are a seller whose business model relies on Auctions, you might consider that or instead adding the Fixed Price upgrade to those listings (fees apply, however, maybe you could appeal to ebay to get these refunded) so that your buyers can at least get a postage estimate that way.
My business model doesn't rely on Auctions, they are mostly an after-thought here. And, as I've stated elsewhere, my outside-Canada sales don't seem to be affected by this problem as significant as it is, since I use primarily Buy It Now (Fixed Price) Good Till Cancelled listings. Oddly, it is my domestic sales that have dropped in recent weeks but those are not affected by the glitch. That decline in domestic sales does, however, occur periodically in my category. If the problem truly began in October, it didn't affect my toy sales over the holiday at all.
Switching to flat-rate shipping is also an option but one that requires thought, planning and time as it's set up to work in a way that users accustomed to Calculated Shipping might struggle with to start. I used flat-rate shipping at first when I began to sell on ebay but soon found Calculated Shipping to be much to my preference, and it worked flawlessly for me for 4.85 of the past five years I've used it. Until this.
There have been countless threads opened on this topic over the past few months, as you can imagine, so I will cite only a few for background should you wish to read through them. Some of the threads were created as Questions in the Answer Centre and you may have to click Comments or View Entire Topic to read all the pertinent discussion available to be shown.
https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Site-Issues/Canadian-sellers-Shipping-calculator-not-showing-results-to...
Also, many thanks to users
bassox333 and
kawartha-ephemera and most of all pjcdn2005 who have laboured to find workarounds and shared their findings with other Canadian sellers in a proactive and cooperative fashion. Other users have contributed the discussion, please forgive me if you also been involved in a helpful, meaningful way but I have not mentioned you. I will do so in future posts if you've been overlooked. Mea culpa.
Good luck, and don't forget to add your voice to the chorus to have this essential tool for Canadian sellers quickly fixed.
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