eBay Applying Its Own Combined Shipping Rates Without Seller's Permission

[jfs]

eBay is up to some new tricks regarding the shipping billed to customers for multiple quantity item orders.

The buyer purchased a quantity of 2.

My eBay preferences charge the buyer Ground Advantage Retail.

The buyer’s zip is located in Zone 4 and the package weight is 4 pounds. The package is less than a cubic foot and a length surcharge does not apply. It was uploaded without any package dimensions and a weight of 4 pounds.

The buyer should have been billed $30.70 ($15.35 x 2) for the shipping.

Instead eBay billed them $18.85 for a 8 pound package for Zone 5.

I have no combined shipping rules in my eBay account. I do not use shipping tables or any similar nonsense.

After 26 years of selling eBay suddenly decided to start combining the weights on their own and billing the customer regardless on what that may do for the seller.

Depending on the situation combined orders have always been handled in two ways:

1. Customer request a combined invoice and then pays.
2. Customer has already paid and after combining the items I send a refund.

Very dangerous for eBay to mess around with simply combining the weights since eBay does not know the size of the package of the combined items. If the package is over a cubic foot then it could be subject to much higher dimensional rates and the seller loses money on shipping.

In some cases the dimensional rates are so high its cheaper to ship the items separately.

Once again all I got was the runaround by eBay.

Their Lies Among Others:

The combined weight was used because I did not enter any dimensions. Makes zero sense as any dimensions would be for a quantity of one. Since I am charging retail there are no Cubic discounts and the rate is based on the weight. But then same rep claimed eBay entered dimensions of 1 x 1 x 1 so the listing did have dimensions, but those can’t be used to calculate USPS rates since the package would violate minimum size requirements.

It happened because I failed to use a rate table or combined shipping rule.

Very lucky for eBay I was able to get the items into a package that did not exceed a cubic foot.

[jfs]

Once again eBay making changes to the seller’s preferences without telling them because eBay could care less about sellers.

If you navigate to Account > Selling > Selling Preferences you will see a section called Combined Shipping.

A screenshot from my account clearly shows I not specified any Combined Shipping Rules.

But to eBay not specifying anything means “YES” so they will now combine the weights of multiple quantity items.

In order to stop that you have to now create a rule telling them “No Discount” so the weights will not be combined to compute a weight.

I asked eBay rep for a copy of message informing sellers of this, but they said eBay would not send any. I ask rep for link to eBay announcement for this change and they could not provide any.

Not really surprised here based upon eBay’s past actions:

Entering me and others into eBay international shipping without our permission and against our wishes, but at least they sent an announcement so you could stop yourself from being screwed over.

Getting rid of carrier specific discounts for a long time after USPS merges First Class and Parcel Select into Ground Advantage.

Once again thank you eBay for wasting my time!