I see the subject of the (still) dysfunctional eBay.ca/.com shopping cart was brought up again at this Wed.'s board hour.
I'm wondering how much this issue is affecting Canadian sellers. My view is that it has had a significant impact on BIN listings, or auction + BIN being less effective, for sellers whose majority of sales are to the U.S.
eBay.ca staffers have suggested there are 2 "workarounds":
1) List on .com -- for some sellers, this may not be a good choice because of the lack of Canada Post shipping options;
2) Tell your buyer(s) to log onto .ca -- this isn't going to be of any use unless the buyer actually contacts the seller and realizes there is a systemic problem. The trouble in my view is that most buyers may just hit the back button.
I haven't had a multiple purchase for a long time. I used to have quite a few, and I offer promotional shipping on multiple purchases, which apparently is now basically a useless promotion. I can't believe this still hasn't been resolved, after -- how many months? Shouldn't the checkout/purchase process be one of the most critical things to do right on a commercial site? Maybe it would be if they spent less time making the site look different, and more time making it actually work!
Here's what one of the .ca staffers said on the subject (you might want to check the whole Wed. discussion):
"Before I go any further, I have to correct myself. Forced Immediate Payment (the provision to protect sellers from unpaid items by only committing an item to a buyer once the item is paid for) doesn't seem to be enforced on the CA site. That policy is enforced on eBay.com however, which is why the US shopping cart not accepting non-US items became a problem in the first place. Also note that this policy is different from and overrides the Immediate Payment feature that any seller can select in the listing flows.
Under normal circumstances, and with a shopping cart that accepts any items regardless of which eBay site they were listed on, forced immediate payment is very advantageous for sellers since it prevents buyers from holding items by committing to buy them and then decide to back out of the transaction or just not pay for them."
