@dutchman48 wrote:
So, the way I read this is if you list on both sites, which are completely different and use different currencies, you can not set up separate discounts for each site in it's currency.
That is because Ebay ties the discount to only 1 currency per ID.
You've understood it correctly. It appears that we Canadian sellers who list on both sites have three choices:
1) Choose one of the currencies (presumably the "busiest" one) for your automated discounts, and let buyers in the other currency use "Request Total". When one of the reps did a test recently by putting a few of my .ca ($CDN) items in the cart, he was able to use the "Request Total" button to ask for an adjusted invoice.
The real problem is for Canadian sellers who don't clearly have more sales in one currency or the other. Then you just have to choose one currency over the other if you want to set up automated discounts.
2) Give up on automated discounts entirely -- apparently then the "Request Total" feature will then work for all buyers, no matter what site/currency they are using.
3) List on one site only, set up automated discounts, and hope your buyers never need to ask for an adjusted invoice (or remove the discounts entirely).
At the moment, I have an automated "free shipping for 4 items" discount set up for $USD (I've always sold more than 90% to the U.S.), but of course that discount won't work for my occasional Canadian buyers -- they have to use "Request Total". This is really not that bad a result for me personally.
However, what to my mind is a far worse problem is what occurs when my U.S. buyers do want to get an adjusted total from me -- for example if they only buy 3 items. The "Request Total" button is still shown on the cart/checkout process, but it doesn't work. Not only does it not function, but it leads to a red error screen telling the customer that "This seller has disallowed combined shipping" (you've no doubt seen my posts with the screen shot of that error page). That is really bad business on eBay's part, and has doubtless sent buyers away in disgust. This is what I refer to as one of eBay's "silent sales killers" for Canadian sellers.
What upsets me is that this has evidently been going on for months, without most sellers being aware of it, and with nary a peep from eBay about it. I've brought this up with the eBay Canada rep I was communicating with lately, and he has said eBay will be looking into disabling that "Request Total" button where the feature is actually not available.
Now, a partial solution (in my case at least, because I sell mainly to the U.S.) is to attempt to set up as many automated and flat rate discounts as possible to cover as many potential order scenarios as possible. I've tried this. It's horribly difficult to do on .com with flat rate shipping and items of varying weights and sizes. I removed the ones I'd set up because they were causing more problems than they were solving. However, if a seller lists exclusively on .ca (in $CDN) and uses calculated shipping, this is a reasonable option. Of course, then you're not dealing with listing on two different sites anyway.
I agree with Pierre that the seller demand for identical dual site functionality in this respect is probably low overall. However, eBay did set itself up as a multi-national venue, and many sellers like to be able to list on more than one site (for example, some might want to list on .uk).
Personally I think eBay should have made universal checkout a top priority years ago, or -- what many online sites have done -- oblige everyone to list in $US and deal with currency conversion at the point of sale.
As I've said previously, checkout and payment flow seems to have been a problem eBay has never been able to fully solve. They need to solve it, one way or another.
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