Overseas postage - arbitrary and daft rates!
By Comagirl
@Comagirl (146)
Spain
June 5, 2010 1:53pm CST
I used to live in the UK and moved to mainland Europe a couple years back. For years and years I have been an avid eBayer, mainly buying, but a fair bit of selling before my move. I always listed items as worldwide shipping, and at a fair rate.
Nowadays I often want to buy items I can't easily get locally, being sold by UK sellers, but so often they either WON'T ship to Europe, or they have some ludicrous mark-up - eg a kids clothing item, postage in UK = £1.50, postage to Europe = £4.50. It's obvious they just put some random amount in without the slightest check as to what it would cost to ship it to me, or maybe just want to discourage overseas bidders? I don't know.
I know for me as a seller, the packaging and hassle factor was one thing, the postage another, and I tried to allow fairly for both - but the thing is the postage goes up dependent on destination, the former involvement does NOT - you still have to pack it and take it to post, regardless of where it's going.
Wouldnt it be good if eBay had some kind of suggested scale of increase/rate - eg non fragile item under 1kg going to Euro post zone will cost you xxx to ship, so we advise an overall p+p not in excess of yyy?
Does anyone else think this would be a good idea? Or would it further increase the commercialisation and professionalisation of eBay, and discourage more and more small sellers from taking the plunge?
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