Warning about eBay International Shipping (EIS): No Combined Shipping
airplanenut
Posts: 22,229 ✭✭✭✭✭
I've spent a ton of time on the phone with eBay today and yesterday trying to figure out an issue, and after some more digging today, it seems many other sellers have run into this. In short, if eBay International Shipping is enabled and a buyer wins multiple items, they cannot be combined, nor can you send an invoice to change any settings (such as shipping internationally yourself and not using EIS).
Beyond this, eBay isn't even consistent. A buyer won two coins from me (both Canadian, one in each of the two Canadian 5 cent categories) and one got sent down the EIS path and the other looks like a regular international sale. I can send an invoice and modify the shipping options at will for the latter, and I can't do anything for the former. It's a huge mess. I decided to give EIS a go not that long ago, and boy am I regretting it now. I've turned it off on my account and will go back to always handling international shipments on my own, as I've been doing for the last two decades or so.
If you want to disable EIS (or make sure you already did) the setting is on this page: https://www.ebay.com/ship/prf (or navigate to it by hovering over your name in the top left corner of eBay.com, clicking Account Settings, then Shipping Preferences in the bottom left column under the bold Selling header).
Comments
I adjust the shipping all the time.
You might check your shipping options on the two items. One might not have had EIS enabled.
They were listed identically except for the final category level. If EIS was disabled in one, I have no idea why and it’s not because of anything I did.
I don't know. But the thing about computers is that they are 100% consistent. There's something different if the outcome was different.
There are two categories for Canadian 5 cents and these were listed in one of each. But if that’s enough for eBay to switch how they handle things, that’s still an issue with the program. After searching the error message I was getting, a lot of people have the same issue that some or all items can’t be invoiced/combined. Without EIS I never had such a problem and could always combine all items in an international order.