International Auctions

[Guest]

[allender]

I notice that there's a new 'caution' showing up on the bid confirmation page: "This is an international seller, beware that shipping costs and times may be higher/longer, take that into account when you leave feedback."

Does anybody know if they're doing this only for the holiday period, just in case items were intended as gifts? I wonder whether the this message will keep some people from bidding. Some of my favorite 'international' sellers are Yaksters.

I agree that the unwashed masses need to be aware that it can take longer for parcels to arrive. (I can't fathom why it takes 2 weeks for Recorded Mail and International Signed For to reach me from the U.K., and almost all of that delay is after items are in the hands of USPS, where it's supposed to be handled as Registered Mail. Maybe there's an unannounced quarantine on important-looking packages.)

If we're protecting the reputations of the sellers, I would think that the caution would be better placed on the Leave Feedback screen. (I would never consider dropping the fast-shipping score a notch without checking when the parcel was posted, but some sellers know that grief comes with the territory.)

[tialessa]

Dunno, but what's crazy with the starred feedback is that anything below "5" is considered bad...  When did "4" become bad? When isn't "3" neutral?

I've had people get annoyed with me when they don't have their items within a week of being shipped.  It doesn't matter if I get to the post office as soon as they open (the day after I get paid), once it's in the hands of the various postal services it's up to them to deliver in a timely manner.... *sigh*

[kbmum]

That's how it's supposed to be, but a lot of buyers blame a seller for slow USPS delivery.  I hate it when a buyer pays for Media Mail or Parcel Post, then complains that it takes more than a week to receive the item.  One woman contacted me three days after shipment, upset that she hadn't received her package.  I explained that it was sent Parcel Post, which can take two or three weeks, and she told me she knew that because she was a seller, too!  She said she just wanted me to know that she hadn't received it yet.  What was I supposed to do about it?  Idiot.

[De Orc]

The caution notice has been a regular thing on ebay UK for quite some time, unfortunatly a lot of buyers do not realise just how long it can take for something to arrive from outside of there country of origin.  I recently had to send a couple of items back to a seller in Holland as they had arrived damaged and they took 16 days to get to him from the UK    Christmas time is the worst time of all to be sending stuff LOL

[allender]

It just started showing up on my searches on ebay.com. Maybe it was 'suppressed' earlier because I always have the "Show Worldwide" box ticked when I search.

I'm not sure that everybody realizes that you can sell and ship internationally, but the auctions don't automatically show up outside your "ebay host country" in the default searches. For instance, if I do a trading card search on "Doctor Who" with the default Location, I find 60 items, only about a third of them from a couple of UK sellers and denominated in £. With the Worldwide box checked, I get 149, mostly from the UK. I never realized the ratio was this drastic until just now.

It appears that what's happening is that, increasingly, you have to pay extra to "maximize international site visibility" and the fees vary by country. So if you pay the minimum and list on ebay.co.uk, your auctions won't show up on ebay.com unless the buyer specifically asks to see them.

Don't spread it around. No wonder I haven't been doing half bad bidding on items listed with strange currency symbols.