I was hoping they would come to their senses. Apparently not.
They extended it once....maybe they thought you would come to your senses first!
Hard to be sympathetic, you've had 10 months or more to change them.
@ricarmic wrote:Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but I've always been on .COM, and have had "free shipping" domestically (ie to the USA) for a very long time. This allows me of course to also have free shipping to Canada (which normally costs me less but my customer base expects me to eat the taxes so the postage savings are more than offset by the taxes I eat for my fellow countrymen). So I haven't paid FVF on shipping ever since the big change years ago. I am lucky that I can utilize flat rate shipping which not everyone can.
If I recall, the reason that eBay wanted to move away from the dual currency option was that it was constraining them from introducing changes because ebay.ca was one of or the only dual currency site. I think that came up in one of the Rapael discussions.
On your first point, I think perhaps your shipping cost to item value ratio to the U.S. and your overall destination mix might be much different than mine. For example, if you regularly make reasonably high-value sales of fairly lightweight and small items, offering free shipping does make sense.
If I sell one of my own line of patterns at, say $15.95 U.S., my flat rate shipping is usually between about $4.00 and $5.75 (U.S.). I sell over 90% to the U.S., most months it's more like 95% to 100%. That doesn't leave me much wiggle room, given my margins. I have few sales to Canada that I could use to offset U.S. free shipping either. The free shipping strategy doesn't work for me on .com the way it did on .ca because of my high percentage of U.S. sales. The other factor is that free shipping is not really expected by buyers in my category, and is seldom offered by sellers, so the pressure to provide free shipping is relatively low.
When I was on .ca, I could rely on the fact that the free domestic (Canadian) sales would be rare enough that they'd pay for my shipping subsidies to the U.S. through savings on FVFs. A $35.00 Expedited parcel to the U.S. cost me nothing in FVFs. Not anymore.
Yet being on .ca in order to benefit from those FVF savings on shipping wouldn't offset the additional sales I've had by listing on .com. I'd like to offer free shipping to my U.S. buyers, but I just can't see any way that it would be worth it for me to throw away shipping costs solely for the minimal savings on FVFs.
Actually, that's not entirely accurate: I do offer free shipping, on the purchase of 4 items or more, and in those cases I simply consider that 1 of the 4 items is a loss in order to pay shipping on the other 3. But it would be nothing but constant losses to offer free shipping on every item. In my category, prices are pretty much stuck too, and everybody knows it -- there isn't any room to roll shipping cost into item price, even if I believed that was fair to my customers.
In fact I'm beginning to wonder whether selling relatively low-value items on eBay is even feasible anymore. Quite some time ago, seeing the writing on the eBay wall, I largely resolved this dilemma by going to sites that permitted sale of PDF items. Needless to say, I have none of these problems there. EBay is now a bit of a backwater for me because of the changes they've made, although I really wish it could work better for my purposes. I'm actually getting close to giving up on it. When my store subscription comes up this May, it's going to be a difficult decision whether to carry on or not. In a word, it's depressing.
On your second point, EBay's claim that the dual currency on .ca was proving a barrier to development could well be true, and makes sense. Or it could be that eBay needed to herd a whole lot of its Canadian sellers off .ca in order to increase its cash flow (which will be the obvious result), and the dual currency technical explanation was a conveniently available excuse. We'll never know. I'm afraid I just don't believe much that eBay says anymore. I just do what I have to as long as my business can survive on this platform. 
