eBay is an African scam !

[marcedesjarlai0]

What is the point of having an eBay account when most purchases are fraudulent? Political Correctness does not allow eBay to block transactions from toilet countries,leaving the sellers wasting their time and resources and paying eBay fees of course, I give it 2 years before eBay is sold off or shut down.  

[momcqueen]

I see that you've recently altered your ship-to locations to exclude most high-risk locations.

As a new seller of high-value items, this is necessary from the start. 

I can assure you that most purchases are NOT fraudulent. 

Set your buyer restrictions to strict, and ship with tracking. You will avoid most pitfalls this way. 

[femmefan1946]

When you are setting up your listings * under Shipping Details,you can choose Custom Locations on the drop down menu.

These will specifically show your listings in the countries you are willing to ship to.**

You can also choose Flat Rate Shipping or Calculated Shipping.

Most of your items are more than 2cm thick and 500 grams so you should be using Calculated Shipping.***

https://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/apps/far/business/findARate?execution=e1s1

You are going to get killed on shipping those boots for $30 to Newfoundland or Puerto Rico.

Shipping is the hardest part of selling online.

sellers wasting their time and resources and paying eBay fees

Sounds as if you had a couple of deadbeats or scammers.

Did you file Unpaid Item Disputes in the Resolution Centre at the bottom of this page?

Those will get your selling fees back -- and warn other sellers who have our Selling Preferences set to automatically Block problem bidders.

If you need advice on how to do this, come back and add a further Reply to this post.

*Don't use auctions. Use Fixed Price/Immediate Payment Required.

** I agree with mjwl that as a new seller you should only ship to Canada and the USA . This should hold until you have at least 10 DSRs and know what DSRs are.

*** And metric measurements. Canada Post went metric in 1974 and every other system will be inaccurate.

[Anonymous]

As a fellow newb, I can share with you the very first lesson I learned: New sellers are targeted if they attempt to sell high value items right out of the gate. If you insist on doing this, at least take every possible precaution and all of the advice of these good folk to protect yourself. Also, and you probably already know this, whatever you do, when they attempt to get your Paypal email, immediately report them and block them. Best of luck, don't be too discouraged.