Why are so many US eBay vendors not selling overseas?

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scoots

scoots

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Over the last few months, I've noticed more US eBay vendors explicitly refusing sales overseas. Now I understand not wanting to do business with shady parts of the world like eastern Europe or Nigeria, or dysfunctional postal systems like Italy, but I am also seeing no sale signs for Alaska, Hawaii etc. (which I suspect is a postal rate issue).

Did eBay change a vendor requirement, or did something reach a tipping point?
 
PayPal is not accepted in Nigeria due to the amount of claims made from there.

I think it has to do with the shipping cost. Prices for international shipping is going up. Plus if a package gets lost or mishandled it's a heck of a lot harder to track it down if it's in a foreign country than it is if it was shipped within the US or Canada. And people who are less than honest know this too.

A friend of ours sold a watch on Ebay to somebody in Germany about 5 years ago.
He shipped it and it was returned with "Item Refused". He sent the buyer an e-mail and they said they never received it and he verified that the address was correct.
And he shipped it again. About a month later it came back again with a "Item not picked up" note on it. He sent the seller an e-mail which was never answered. He still has the watch in a box on a shelf 4 years later and he has never received a reply to his e-mail or a complaint from the buyer. He said he'll hold on to it until it has 10 years sitting time and he'll resell it.
 
Shipping?

A lot of it must be because of that.

I've recently been putting a lot of thought and time into hunting down stuff to complete a cooling-system overhaul on the BMW. Parts locally, even through online suppliers here in Australia will often exceed the cost of buying stuff from the U.S., going through a depreciated A$ and coughing up for "USPS First Class" or whatever.
An eBay seller managed to sell me a box full of heater hoses, thermostat housing (aluminium), thermostat, metal water pump and ship it via FedEx for about $50. I then try to get some bolts, individually, since that is more convenient than getting them locally for the same price in packs of 5, 10 and so on. 17 bolts would cost $50 shipping via USPS...

So really, I think it boils down to international customers giving sellers a poor rating because they aren't offering "better" shipping options for their customers, or customers are trying very hard to get the seller to discount the shipping price for them.

I'm surprised as to why the prices are going up; From what I understood, there was a supposed downturn in the air-freight industry, with many aircraft going out to pasture now as a result of this (e.g. LH MD-11's). So it must be input costs, like labour and fuel(?)
 
Naw, the MD-11's are being parked because a lot of them are old, they are not particularly efficient anymore. McD never sold a lot of them. A lot of airlines that had them (Delta, American, Swiss) got rid of them because they weren't able to make the efficiency goals that the manufacturer said they would. The era of the tri-jet is over. Delta just announced by 2017 all their 747's will be gone too.

Even though fuel prices are coming back down from record highs the cargo carriers and airlines are not reducing the the charges that they are charging their customers to ship things. And I have also heard that cargo is in a slump too.
 
Lots of reasons...

poor communication, shipping costs, customs hassles, &c &c. We've dealt in vintage tube audio and antique car stuff on ebay all over the world for many years. No longer will we sell or ship out of the US. Asian buys tend to be the most flaky we've found, but other palces have issues. Recently we sold a vintage '50s car parts manual to Ontario, the size and weight of a medium sized telephone book, and they do not have anything like USPS Media Mail...shipping that book 150 miles cost $54!! Canada Post is out of control!
 
Yes....
Italian postal service, is one of the many countless shames of this country...
But now, ebay found out a way to deal with these problems, it's called "international shipping program" handled by Pitney Bowes, Pitney Bowes takes care of the international shippings ...for a seller is the same as if they sent the item domestically.
Pitney bowes takes care to ship into the int destination and calculate and ask priorly customs fees, for EU destinations items are all customs cleared in the UK, in the PB hub by Pitney bowes customs brockerage agents, like every courrier would do, Pitney bowes offers the brocketage service of a courrier, but shipping costs are way less.
I have not much time to talk about it now, but some others would maybe explain better...
This program has some pros and some cons that depends on the weight of the items (worth for heavy stuff, not for light small ones) or countries ( for ex many canadians finds it's more expensive)....also inflated and undue customs or customs brockerage charges that otherwise wouldn't be due in some counties..... and it's not completely honest on what they ask you..... though in many cases cheaper than whatever courrier would ask you for the same service.
Maybe the fact many refuse to now has something to do with this new program possibility???? Just wondering if there's a correlation....

[this post was last edited: 11/18/2014-11:23]
 
Some eBay sellers were avoiding eBay fees by selling an item for a low price, but then inflating the shipping so that it covered at least part of the cost of the item. eBay retaliated by making shipping costs a separate part of the rating that a buyer could give a seller.

So, a seller offering free shipping (thus the cost of shipping was included in the price of the item) would get higher/better ratings than a seller who didn't offer free shipping. Of course, eBay made out this way, because then they would make more money by charging their percentage of the item sale price, which now included the cost of shipping.

My guess is that some sellers don't want to risk getting dinged in the ratings for charging for shipping, hence sales only to continental U.S. customers.
 
eBay has changed

From the days when most of us knew. Things are much more buyer centric in that one problem/complaint can cause no end of trouble for sellers.

If a buyer initiates any sort of dispute action (item received isn't what ordered, item not received, damage, etc....) it can and often does automatically cause certain holds/actions by eBay and Paypal against the seller's account. If you are dealing with a postal system outside of the USA (not that ours is always a shining example) sorting out when something was received and or damage claims is just a nightmare.

Have seen too many fingers burned where an American seller is dinged because someone in Germany or Italy claims an item was not received or whatever. All this on top of the added fees and paperwork that comes from international shipping. Best not to bother is how some see things.
 
Ditto to Launderess, that's the main reason why one stops doing that...
I usually had myself helping out many US ebay sellers with issues with postal service and italian buyers, contacting post office on their behalf, translate etc all what I could...
Even true that all this it's so since awhile now, at least it's not matter of recent months...isn't it? So what changed recently??? If I have to be honest though, I don't actually see this further drop of intl. shipping availability in these months.,..it's pretty stable actually...
But if there's, may it have something to do with the new system of seller performances ratings??? (Above/under average?)

I tell you....
Actually, now I can see much more items from my list of watched shops , that's because sellers who joins to Pitney bowes service will have all of their listing available to international, so while before sellers didn't put heavy stuff available for intl, as they realized/assumed the USPS fee was so high that no-one would ever pay that amount for the item that was, now you simply have everything automatically made available for intl, and also as I said, the shipping prices from pitney bowes are much lower than what USPS or courriers would typically ask for those heavy items, with PB may be really worth it, too bad it's just the opposite for cheap and or small and light itmes , to be clear (the ones they'd just let usually go with parcel post, or flat rate envelopes)...
 
Pitney-Bowes

The Pitney-Bowes International Program is now switched on by default for sellers, and is a real pain to turn off if you make any changes to your listing. Shipping setup is a hassle, too, as you have to create a specific profile for that item rather than simply entering weight and choosing a carrier.

I like to stick with domestic-only transactions for reasons mentioned above, but if an international buyer contacts me while the auction is going, I usually have no problem shipping to them. I think this is true of many ebayers...never hurts to ask.
 
Yes, infact I purchased many items through ebay US simply by asking if they'd ship intl. someome was reluctant at first, others just said NOT... but most of the times me saying them that I have much experience in such things, 90% of my positive feedback both the left and of course received ones being made of transactions from the US, and them seeing I can speak the language, probably makes me look as trustable person to ship to (and I am), never a problem I couldn't solve myself, even because sellers can do very little from the US....yes, postal service is a shit made of crooks and inepts in this country, but if you know how it works and what and how to do, you can have the issues solved by your own......it just takes muuuuuuch patience...and knowledge of the postal service sickness and tactics.
 
About Pitney Bowes being the default, and not allowing to chose to apply it only to certain listings, yes, is a real BS and downside of this thing...and will limit the sale of small light items.
I dont see Pitney bowes catching on much primarily because of it.
That's because as I told it's great for big and heavy, not small and light.
To make a few examples...
I just purchased 30kg of "washing powder" from UK for which shipping of these five 5,8 kg bags was just 34 GBP......well, if you think they were going to ask me 13£ to ship 5 atomizers for my e-cigarette (while they' usually go with priority envelope royal mail for 2£ from all the others not pitney bowes) then you see there's not proportionalism, and nobody will buy it...your small items will be penalized.
Though I'm glad for the heavy stuff good price, and that's good it works also for Inside EU shippings, like the one from UK, I tried to purchase some phosphated asian OMO powder from UK time ago, the cheapest quote they could get was 40 GBP for 10 kg powder, now I am getting 3 times more that, for less thanks to PB, that would be a nice thing if only it were developped sensibly, but as for most of ebay's "improvements" they often end to be made wrongly, resulting in a pain in the ass or huge failure....
 
I often do not sell overseas because it is a pain to fill out the customs forms. Plus if the item is bigger, shipping goes way up in price and ebay's shipping calculator doesn't calculate international shipping accurately. This leads to another pain: manually calculating shipping for several potential bidders who then never bid.
 
I've sold quite a bit on Ebay and selling to international buyers is def a real pain. I sold a bunch of toys to a lady in the Philippines a while back and it was def more hassle than it was worth.

I haven't' used the new service from Ebay where you mail the package to their center and then it's sent international. I sold something to a lady in Canada a few months ago and she specifically asked me NOT to use that service.
 
I've given up on Ebay pretty much, buying and selling. It's just too complicated and now with this new stuff added no thanks. It was so much easier to have the seller ship to Canada with the USPS than using UPS or Fedex etc. They're more expensive and they always tack on a brokerage fee whereas the post office rarely does. In fact I never had to pay a brokerage fee when it came thru the mail and nothing ever got lost or damaged by them.
 

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