Hello Community,
As most of you probably know, eBay announced that as of September 22, 2009 sellers will no longer be allowed to include shipping insurance on their listings as an option for buyers to purchase. However, eBay pointed out that it is sellers who are responsible for their items until the items are safely in their customers' hands. And they were very clear that insuring shipped items is an option that sellers still have, as items are subject to damage or loss during shipment.
Auctiva believes that high quality Shipping Insurance is a very important need for sellers, even with eBay's policy change. We will continue to make Auctiva Shipping Insurance available to our sellers (at the same low rates; up to 30% less than insurance purchased from USPS) after eBay’s new policy goes into effect September 22. And...we are going to make purchasing Auctiva Shipping Insurance easier and more hassle free for you.
Auctiva users currently can opt to have policies purchased automatically or you can buy policies for individual listings manually. The feedback we have received is that our automatic purchase option doesn’t give everyone enough flexibility or control over buying insurance.
On September 9th, we will update the Auctiva site to give you a new tool for purchasing insurance that will let you set up automated rules to control when insurance should be purchased automatically and when it should not. (There are also some other goodies in this update besides insurance…I will post more on these early next week.)
We are calling this new feature ‘Auto-Purchase.’ Here’s a preview of the screen where you will set this up. It’s really simple and easy to use. (Click on the link below to view it)
http://img.auctiva.com/imgdata...bimg/299870161_o.jpg
You can use Auto Purchase to automatically purchase insurance policies for all carriers (most people only use one or two) or you can opt to purchase insurance only for USPS shipments. You will also be able to set a rule up where insurance will be purchased only if the value of the item is greater than some threshold amount (say $100 for example) that you enter. And—if you ship both to the US and internationally—you can have separate auto purchase rules for each.
We are thinking about doing more development on this if enough people are interested. If you think of an automated rule for purchasing insurance that you feel would be helpful, please let us know.
You make your request using our Feature Center request screen (hover over ‘Home’ and then click ‘Feature Center’.) After you enter your request for a new Auto Purchase rule, we will make it visible post it so others can vote on it.
There is one more piece of good news about Shipping Insurance...
As I mentioned earlier in this post, our normal rates are already 30% less than USPS rates. As a part of our September 9th site update, we are putting shipping insurance on sale—20% off our already low normal rates through the remainder of 2009. To take advantage of this discount you will need to turn on the Auto Purchase feature after it is available on the Auctiva site.
After you turn Auto Purchase on, be sure to leave Auto Purchase turned on to continue receiving the discount. If Auto Purchase it is turned off, the discount will no longer be applied to your insurance purchases.
You will be able to turn on Auto Purchase right after we finish updating the site on the 9th, but neither the rules nor the discount will take effect on insurance purchases until September 22nd when eBay releases their SR-2 (Seller Release 2) update.
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