If this is one of the other "major" changes Donna talked about, this one is a "who cares" to me. I don't list for international sales, so it doesn't matter. What is of interest, is when I did sell internationally and had "worldwide" checked, people found the listings. What makes this extra cost option so special?
It's just voluntary fee for an extra service, like Jeff Who cares, I get plenty of In'l buyers just as it is with out the enhancement. At least it is not being ramed down my throat.....
Apparently our listings have not appeared in their search results using the default search (for quite some time now). They only saw items listed on the international site, not the US site. They had to use an advanced search technique that perhaps all users wouldn't know about. Savvy buyers would know how to do this, or just go directly to ebay.com and look there. Either way, international buyers DID find the items they were looking for.
Now, for an extra fee, you can have your item show up on the foreign site without any extra effort on the part of the foreign buyer to locate it.
Is it worth the extra 10 to 40 cents? I say NO. Buyers will find your items if they want them. This is just another nickel and dime attempt. In fact, I list items that plainly say US only, and I still get emails from foreign buyers wanting to know if they can bid, and some don't even ask - they just bid. So why should I pay extra when they're seeing them anyway. This is just to trick novice and newbie users into giving eBay a few more pennies of their profit margin.
jeff thank you. I actually list that I will ship international and did not realize that my items were not showing up in the mix... yes I guess eBay will find any way to get that extra .05 to what ever they can feed off of the newbies
Another reason I come here and lurk to see what all of you seasoned sellers have to say! Learn something every once in a while
So thank you all...
Posts: 153 | Location: http://www.stores.ebay.com/gitasan | Registered: September 26, 2007
It works the same way in reverse. When you search for "something" you don't see that "something" on the UK site, the French site, the German site, etc. In fact, the latter two sites aren't even in English, they are in the native language of the country. So it makes "some" sense that a user on the French or German site wouldn't want to see US listings because, well, they don't speak English.
However, to charge an extra fee to have our items show up on other English speaking sites by default, is petty. It's just more nickel and dimes.
Does anyone know if this means that out listings will no longer show up because we selected "international shipping" on our listings and we thus have to pay the extra nickel to be seen at all?
This message has been edited. Last edited by: Thurston,
This caught me off guard at first as well, as I always thought as long as I shipped to that country, my items would show up in their search results.
In doing a little more research, it looks like buyers are finding international items similarly as to how eBay store items are found on the US site. If you do a search on ebay UK for "roger maris" you'll notice 3 items are found and since this is a low amount of results, eBay then displays the following search section:
"325 items found for roger maris from eBay international sellers"
So, for items that are rare on other eBay sites, your item will be (somewhat) easy to find without using the new eBay international upgrade option. For items that are not, then perhaps paying to get into their search results will result in getting more international sales.
-Kevin
Posts: 945 | Location: Chico, CA | Registered: April 16, 2001
I have found that if you are listing items primarily originating from the UK then the buyers must be searching the UK site directly particularly in the collectibles field.
My current items are only listed on the UK site and I am getting global interest and sales as usual.
Posts: 1884 | Location: England, UK | Registered: June 13, 2007
My account is with .uk and up till about a ear ago items listed there showed up on .com When they took that away my sales dropped by 30% so I was forced to do duplicate listings for the USA but I get free gallery there (us poor Brits still have to pay for that!) It may well save me time and money to use this new option and cut out all my US listings so could be good news. As with all the other recent changes which everyone was complaining about I don't see the problem as they too bought my costs down overall. Sometimes we just have to give it a go and see what happens. Of course ebay want to screw as much out of us as possible but they ain't stupid and know they need to keep generating sales for us
