Well This Is A First For Me

Just made a sale on Ebay for $2.35. I have free shipping on everything so did not understand the $14.35 shipping that was added to the sale by Ebay. It was for their global shipping program. My first concern was Ebay fees on the total transaction would be a negative sale but was assured through the chat service that it would only be on the sale plus domestic sales tax. Guess the buyer really wanted that stamp set.

Or the buyer did not notice the Ebay charges.

I, currently, am looking at an item. The seller offers Ebay's Global Shipping. I, certainly, will not pay £ 15 on a £ 17 order. So, let's see if the seller wants to offer an alternative.

Are you sure you did not miss a major variety?

I am confused about the expectations on shipments to foreign countries from eBay. For example I had found a small group of Nigerian definitives that would have been useful for my collection, but the seller who is in Great Britain wanted 15 Great Britain pounds for the shipping due to the international program. At the same time I have received numerous Lots from a Belgian seller who only charges about 6 Euros or so for shipping. So what is the expectation eBay has on foreign shipments nowadays? Can a seller opt in or out of this program?

Yes, sellers can opt out. They can also set other choices in addition to global shipping (if they don't it defaults to the global shipping).

I offer free postage in Australia and A$3.50 worldwide. If the seller sets shipping costs, the global program doesn't come into play. Wheelman, your Ebay listings show postage to Australia of A$15, which would be a deterrent to me.

Don't hesitate to ask the seller if there is an alternative, as many will find a way to reduce the cost. If they don't, then don't buy their goods.

I would imagine that some sellers like the arrangement as it provides them with a lot of extra usary fees compared to what they actually spend to ship things.

As I've mentioned before, you may find that you've been re-enrolled in the GSP despite having opted out. ebay makes life difficult for those of us - well, me - who used to add the actual postage cost to invoices for foreign buyers. I now have to calculate a specific price and include it in the "International" section when I list a lot. If the item is cheap, cheerful and lightweight, that's simple, as a standard letter under 100 gms costs £2.20 to anywhere. Anything else is a problem.

I contacted the seller of the item I referred to above. He replied international mail had gone 'awol' a few times. He used Ebay Global Shipping as assurance. He did offer the possibility to send me the stamps through Royal Mail.

Only once has an item I bought through Ebay - never through Delcampe - gone missing. This came from Spain and the seller sent me a replacement.

It has happened that mail from the UK has been missing but turned up in the end. This happened recently, when the item turned up after almost a month.

Once, pre-BREXIT, it was a new issue sending of Machins. It was sent insured and I received a replacement. A year later, the sending arrived. The cover was open. All the stamps were there. It had been damaged at customs - no charges applied at the time and customs had nothing to do with the order - and lying around for a long time.

Ebay Global Shipping must be costing sellers a lot of business as it makes smaller cheaper lots uninteresting for anyone living abroad.

If I understand correctly, when using eBay program the shipment fees go to eBay, and the seller also has to pay for shipping his package to the eBay center. eBay hides the actual cost of the shipping, and I saw two identical items, from the same seller, that eBay charged very different shipping fees.
In most of my purchases, the shipping fee is greater than the item price, sometimes several folds. So eBay's "present" is not a present at all.

The charge is visible to the buyer, the cost to Ebay is not. But that is not different to the Post Office. You know the charge, you do not know the cost to the Post Office.

When a seller sends you an item, you can see the stamps on the package.
With eBay, they used a local shipping company, and there weren't any stamps or invoice to show the shipping cost, only a grey bag.

That means that you can see the cost to the seller of buying the service, but not the cost to the post office of providing it.

@Rob Roy,

You keep falling into the trap that if an apple does not have a price tag and you pay € 1 for it you must be scammed. But if that apple has a € 1 price tag it costs € 1 and it is a fair price.

PostNL requires me to stick the same tariff stamp on a postcard addressed just across the border as on a 20-grammes letter to New Zealand. I have a very hard time believing both would cost the same.

Sending a postcard from Slovakia to me is considerably cheaper then sending one from here to Slovakia. I suspect Dutch sorters and postmen are earning more than their counterparts. With most of the work done at the receiving end, I expect the costs are lower for sending it to Slovakia.

I guess the difference in cost is affected by the difference in salary at the postal service.
As for the "scam", I think I mentioned elsewhere that I saw on eBay two offers, from the same seller, for similar items (same weight), in the same time frame, and for no reason the shipping fee was significantly different.

I remember your post about the charges on those two items.

Although I see differences in the Ebay Global Shipping fees I cannot explain, they are not excessively different.

I do think some Ebay functionalities are non-transparant. I also think the sellers are a factor. Probably, the non-transparant, or complicated functionalities that Ebay introduces at will make it too cumbersome or difficult for sellers to adjust the settings.




Although contractors are complaining PostNL is paying them unfairly, I suspect Dutch sorters and postmen earn more than their Slovak counterparts. Emptying a mailbox and sorting international mail, I expect, does not require as much labour as local sorting and delivering the mail to my mailbox. If most of the work is done at the receiving end. I should be paying less for sending mail to Slovakia than from there to my home address.

I, also, expect overhead to be much higher in Slovakia than in the Netherlands.

As a follow up to this - I had to go into my Ebay settings and set things up to opt out of the Global shipping program. I am fairly certain that I had previously opted out of this program. Not sure why I was all of a sudden in it again.