Combined invoice problem

[deltadelta48]

I don't know the situation in the States, so I'm not going to presume to comment on deltadelta's system except to say that it seems to me that some buyers in further away locations are going to get ripped off because of the single rate he/she charges. Certainly over here if we tried something like that, we'd have a lot of complaints about overcharging by huge amounts.

It doesn't work over here, and I don't understand why deltadelta can't understand why his/her system doesn't apply to the rest of the world where postal systems are completely different, not just an extension of the US one.

I was with you marschenegger until you got to the bit about blackballing anyone who made a chargeback because they used regular mail. Things do get lost in the post (the Royal Mail manage to lose one around every 9 months for me), and it's not the buyer's fault that RM lose it, the buyer shouldn't have to pay a silly amount just to ensure that it gets to where it's addressed. I think it's reasonable in that case to just refund and make a compensation claim, then seller and buyer don't lose out, and the cost is defrayed to the people responsible for the loss. Doesn't the Canadian postal service pay compensation for lost packages?

Of course every postal system is DIFFERENT, and not every buyer is an expert at selecting which service the seller should use. I don't use anything domestically but first class airmail and priority shipping and the choice is determined by weight. That is fastest and good value for the buyer. Anything else is slow and only a little cheaper. For international I use the same.

As far as flat rate charges, buyers PREFER that to a calculator which the seller can add charges to in US. Flat rate shipping works if seller is in center of counry (I am), and if the packages are small (mine are). It is simply a matter of weighing item and taking average of some postal codes. If it costs $1.29, $1.30, $1.35, $1.39, $1.45 to ship to several points half way across country, $1.35 or $1.45 is charged,. Will people feel cheated ($1.29 versus $1.35), no one complains over ten cents.. They will complain if the charge, calculated or flat is $9.99. Which as I pointed out, some people do and claim it is the postal calculator costs.

Allowing no choice is not unusual. I sold about 6000 items on feebay that way, and about 500 here and never got a complain about lack of domestic calculator or use of flat rate for domestic shipping. Never got a complain that they were unable to select a slower way and save 50 cents either. Most buyers know it gets ridiculous for a seller to have to mail out 12 packages twelve different ways. Or as we discussed, have a combined invoice with ten items and have buyer try to figure out best way to ship, and goof up or give up.

You are the professional seller and shipper and you should be able to select shipping methods/prices that satisfy your customers instead of insisting they should decide.

Ebid will never produce the perfect invoice. But if ebid gives sellers option of changing every single space on the invoice, as the default, then those of us who take one minute to combine and send an invoice will end up fooling around for ten minutes changing each of the 25 shipping method lines, etc. That is a time waster and if someone who is familiar with form takes ten minutes to complete, just think how long it takes someone who rarely has combined invoices.

Finally, I look at lost packages differently. If package is under $20 in value, I DO NOT require insurance/confirmation and simply write off the loss immediatly (which is required by ebid, by the way, seller is responsible for package arriving). If package is over $20 I provide the insurance and confirmation FREE to the buyer. Again, if lost, they get refund immediately. Since only 1 in 500 gets lost, it saves money to do it this way, again, not everyone can do this or wants to provide something free to their buyers. I just can't see buyers/sellers paying $2 for insurance/confirmation on each of 500 packages, especially if the item is only worth $5, when chance of loss is slim to none.. Why bother?

I can't see blackballing people either. Hopefully you try to solve the problem before that is done unless they are a real nut.

[marschenegger]

Ebid will never produce the perfect invoice.

Why is that? This sounds like a defeatist statement. Perhaps we should try before giving up. If other sites can produce an invoice that works, why can't we?

[florida33549]

Why is that? This sounds like a defeatist statement. Perhaps we should try before giving up. If other sites can produce an invoice that works, why can't we?

Agree. It can't be that hard.

[FBNeNotes]

I have sent 6 combined invoices to 6 different customers in the last 5 weeks... they were all perfect. Never a problem with postage and discounts. In fact I have never had an invoice problem here. So I am wondering why folks here have problems.
I think the invoice system here at eBid is perfect, honest

[SalusLibrorum]

I guess I should have qualified what I said with a statement to the effect that the things I sell (coins and paper money) cannot be insured by Canada Post. When I say these items cannot be insured, under certain circumstances they can be, but the system is really convoluted. It was easier years ago when Canada Post said flatly that they would not insure coins and paper money under any circumstances. Also, PayPal didn't exist beyond 10 years ago. Anyhow, when CP became an official distributor of Royal Canadian Mint Products, they had to bend the rules and allow insurance for coins. They used to say that they would not insure documents, and paper money is considered a document (it is legal tender printed and distributed by the Bank of Canada). Now they say they don't insure "paper". Those are the words I hear every time I bring a package to the post office and I ask for insurance. So I usually end up telling fibs to get my packages insured because CP employees are like most normal people in the sense that they don't understand the difference between regular paper money used as legal tender and numismatic collectables (i.e. merchandise). Even if the CP rules allowed paper money to be insured, I'm not sure that it would prudent to walk into the post office and declare that your package contains rare old paper money worth X hundreds of dollars.

Merchandise can be insured by the post office, and I understand laws that say it is up to sellers to insure the items they deliver. But what about my situation when I can't buy insurance or I am breaking the post office rules to obtain insurance? I believe at least some responsibility has to reside with the buyers of coins and paper money because the seller can't properly protect him/herself since there's not a shipping company in Canada that will knowingly take a package containing money and guarantee its delivery. All of this discussion becomes rather moot when PayPal is rolled into the equation. PayPal operates under its own set of rules and it doesn't matter what are the laws of the countries in which it operates. PayPal chooses to refund the buyer almost all of the time. PayPal requires sellers to protect themselves by using only a shipping service with tracking and signature on delivery. So PayPal is twisting my arm to limit the shipping options I use. Even when I sell something worth $1, I have to use a shipping service with tracking to make sure the buyer gets it? The lowest cost of which I know is registered mail, and I charge $10 within Canada for that. The quick solution would be to not use PayPal. That's a great idea if I want to see my sales go down by at least 50% domestically, 90% internationally. Since I want to stay in business, I must keep using PayPal.

You say that you lose packages in the mail every so often. How do you know they were lost? Unless you had tracking on every one of them, there's no way to tell the difference between a genuinely lost package and a false claim made by the buyer. When I say there's no way to tell, there's probably circumstantial evidence that every seller uses to assess whether a claim is real or not. When a buyer does not communicate and goes straight to PayPal to open a dispute, I tend to believe that the buyer is not sincere and is trying to get a freebie. So instead of blackballing every buyer who files a claim against me, I would use my discretion to evaluate the situation and determine if the buyer is a high risk to repeat the behaviour. It's the same kind of discretion used by insurance companies who decide if they want to offer a car insurance policy to a high risk driver. I have to assume that every buyer is perfectly aware of PayPal's inherent bias as well. This is why I feel that I have to offer buyers the opportunity to select a secure shipping option in lieu of just telling them they have to accept one shipping method of my choosing. If I do this and the buyer turns down the secure option to save a few dollars, and then the buyer files a claim against me, I feel entitled to blackball that person, though it is completely at my discretion. Ultimately, when the post office loses a package, it should be the post office's fault and the claim should be against them, but they shirk the responsibility even though the workforce of Canada Post is composed of well-paid union members who would never knowingly do anything wrong, like stealing mail (uh-huh). PayPal certainly will not fill the void, so I think the responsibility then shifts to the seller and buyer (or sender and recipient). Of course buyers are going to want to get the things they purchase, so it's always the seller who gets the poopy end of the stick when something goes wrong. Not coincidently, it's the seller that does all of the work to sell an item, so it's only fair that the hardest-working person involved gets shafted when something goes wrong. No wonder so many sellers are leaving e**y and, to a lesser extent, PayPal.

In theory, Canada Post does pay compensation for lost packages that are insured. But you can't insure regular mail. The insurable shipping options cost a heckuva lot more.

Yes, I can see why you do it that way now. I've never had a chargeback from PayPal over a lost package. Normally I find out there's a problem by an email asking me how long it will be before it will be delivered, and whether it has been dispatched yet. I get one of those emails, get vaguely depressed about it, scan in the proof of posting that I always get and send a copy to the buyer along with an email explaining my lost book procedure (which always mentions co-operation with an official investigation by the Royal Mail). At this point it either turns up very quickly, or it doesn't and they get refunded. I don't know if they're being honest or not, but either way the Royal Mail pays out compensation for the lost package, and their name and address is logged so that if too many get lost in their area/their address, then there really can be a proper investigation.

[marschenegger]

I have sent 6 combined invoices to 6 different customers in the last 5 weeks... they were all perfect. Never a problem with postage and discounts. In fact I have never had an invoice problem here. So I am wondering why folks here have problems.
I think the invoice system here at eBid is perfect, honest

Read the first post in this thread and then maybe you will see what I am talking about.

[deltadelta48]

A buyer asked me if I combine shipping on multiple items won and I had to tell him theres no way e-bid does this that I can see, Am I blind? I just started here and dont like it, I wanted to see how I can cancil my subscription and theres another problem, Dont the people who set this site up have a brain, Go ahead, Try to cancil. They tell you to go to myebid,then my subscriptions and in the drop down menu you can cancil, Theres no option there what so ever??? Hummmmm, Ya think they don't know this and other @#$%^&*.
e-bid, FIX THESE CONCERNS OR YOU WILL NEVER BE ANYTHING LIKE EBAY!!!!

My my my! Easy as pie. Begin to make an invoice for ONE of the purchased items, then look at top of invoice and you will see option for combining all purchases on ONE invoice. As you select each item, it pops it into invoice (or select ALL).

Then look to bottom of invoice you just created. There you will see option to discount both items and shipping with little drop down boxes (% or $).

Was that so hard?


No, we will NEVER be like feebay. If ebid became just like feebay, many of us would quit on the spot! We went thru the unfair practices there. Don't need to do that again. Here we can issue negatives to people who are nasty and/or do not pay us. Here we can make suggestions for improving the site and we are listened to. Here we can connect with nice people from around the world and solve selling problems together. We help each other here, try to find that on feebay.

[deltadelta48]

Why is that? This sounds like a defeatist statement. Perhaps we should try before giving up. If other sites can produce an invoice that works, why can't we?

For two reasons. You can't please everyone, and changing the invoice from single item to multple items needs certain flexibilities that are never going to be offered here or anywhere. This is brutal truth, not "I give up" statement.

This is why. A single item invoice reflects what it costs for postage for ONE item and ONE wrapping (you build this in whether shipping is by calculator, by flat shipping rate etc. Otherwise you would lose money on every item). However, when a buyer buys 15 items, the system makes an invoice that reflects postage for 15 items, PLUS 15 wrappings (if that single shipping cost is used as a base and of course it is). The seller always has to make an adjustment manually to use only base postage cost, or the invoice will be wrong and the buyer overcharged.

If you doubt this, pull 10 or 15 items out of your listings, and add the postage together. This is what the invoice does. You will instantly see that the invoice will have postage that is way off, maybe $65 when it is obvious that the items can be boxed/mailed for much less. Why? because whatever way you calculated that single rate, the wrapping gets multiplied and really should not be. It has to be taken out and this can only be done manually.

It can also be argued that someone has to manually make the right decision to select the correct shipping method too.

Unless the ideal invoice allows the flexibility of separating the postage cost from the wrapping cost, the combined invoice will never be automatic and correct. The seller must always go in and correct the overcharge.

Feebay tried to product the perfect invoice, and has never succeeded to do it automatically without overcharging buyers for multple buys.
I am saying that I think the perfect invoice is not possible because they all lack flexibility to make the above calculation.

Ebid can't please people who will accept only the FEEBAY invoice. Ebid can't produce an invoice that correctly selects the right shipping method for the combined weight, nor can it correct the weight of the combined to reflect removing the single wrapping weight either.
No matter what the automation available, you still need the seller to give that combined invoice another look and have them make the necessary adjustments. That is brutal fact, not a give up attitude.

[RedfiveToys]

Hi,
I have had the same problem, but only with the International Invoices!

I have recently had two international buyers purchase a number of items from me. I have then offered them a number of shipping options via AAL ( as I can not it seems put them on the invoice), they have requested the shipping option they want then I add it to the invoice. I email it to them (+ a copy to me) and the shipping is showing as £0.00 on the copy received through the email, but is still showing on the AAL version!

I contacted eBid after the first International Buyer to let them know about the error, and at first they did not understand and thought I was talking about the Shipping Not known on the sales message!

But after another 2 messages they seemed to understand, and said they would look into it.

However, I have just had a second international buyer, and the same thing has happened.

I have no problem with combined invoices for buyers within the UK, only the international ones. I hope that this gets sorted out asap, as it will only lead to confusion and frustration with the buyers, who may go elsewhere if they feel they are being messed about by sellers here.

[summersunshine]

I had an issue with ebid invoicing. My delivery charge was £2.30 but ebid charged £1.50. Buyer wouldn't pay the difference!