Why these stupid ebay postage limits?

StormWarrior

I recently sold 2 items on ebay. The maximum ebay would let me charge for postage in that category was £6 per item, but it cost me nearly double this. Why do they have these limits, and if they must have limits, why can't they ensure that it's enough to cover the cost?

dudara

Moved to Online Buying & Auctions

dudara

Gooseygoosey

In UK, they can price parcels very easily by small packets, large packets etc.

It is a flat rate where as we here in Ireland are by weight and size so it depends on what you are selling. In UK, nearly everything is small packet which is as far as I know £3.81.

If you are based in Ireland, you should sell from the Irish site where the rates are essentially all over the place due to the nature of our postal service (ie different weights for everything) and since we are an island, everything is international bar our own postage.

Grumpypants

I use ebay.ie for this reason. I tried to sell something on the .co.uk site before and it wouldnt let me charge any postage ! i had to offer free postage and add the cost to the price i was charging which in turn pushed up the ebay charges.

Gooseygoosey

If you want to reach the UK market on Ebay.ie, before you sell check and organise your postage costs, tick the box for UK and put in the price. Essentially, regular/registered (maybe you use both) mail from Ireland to UK/Europe will be the same as we are an island and apart from N Ireland which is local everything else is international.

It is worth noting as well never to send items to Italy, Greece, Romania or Turkey without registering them as there postal systems are quite mad. And also, the UK is the only postal service that doesn't track their registered mail on line (the service is the same other than you can't follow it)

Hope this helps

StormWarrior

I do actually live in the UK anyway, I didn't know it was different for different countries. I just don't get why ebay has these limits though, and why they are so low?

Grumpypants

People went over board they would sell a ps3 game for example for 10 euro and charge 40 postage. That way they pay 10% Final value fee on the tenner. If they did it the other way around it would cost them 4 euro not 1 in fee's.

ttm

Grumpypants wrote: »

People went over board they would sell a ps3 game for example for 10 euro and charge 40 postage. That way they pay 10% Final value fee on the tenner. If they did it the other way around it would cost them 4 euro not 1 in fee's.

Quite true but there are other ways of looking at it. If you want to set a reserve price but don't want to pay the reserve price fee then you could add the reserve into the postage. Worst of all there are still sellers who will try and scam stupid buyers who don't read all the listing into buying an item which they think is cheap untill they go to pay for it.

StormWarrior

But how can they set the maximum postage price so low that it doesn't actually cover the postage costs?

rubadub

StormWarrior wrote: »

But how can they set the maximum postage price so low that it doesn't actually cover the postage costs?

The lower it is, the more profit they get. It probably does cover the costs for sellers within the UK, they cannot account for every single country, it could cost a fortune to ship from mongolia to the UK, I doubt they would set the limit that high. It might be also to encourage sellers to stick to their own domains i.e. ebay.ie

Nody

StormWarrior wrote: »

But how can they set the maximum postage price so low that it doesn't actually cover the postage costs?

They decided how much postage to UK was reasonable for all products and made it mandatory add with a maximum charge for it. They don't care if you have to send it from Australia or not and you need to have that in the minimum price basically.

StormWarrior

But I posted it within the UK, in fact within the westcountry, it only went across one county! The maximum postage still didn't cover it.

Grumpypants

Postage in Ireland is all over the place i normally sell DVD's ive paid anything from 90cent to 2:40 to post within Ireland !! The norm seems to be 1:35.

Athlone_Bhoy

Anyone got a link for the max they can now charge for postage?

RasTa

It's for UK sellers only.

rubadub

StormWarrior wrote: »

But I posted it within the UK,

What was the category & item? how much did it cost? did you wrap it up in a big box or something?

Was it registered? I have heard lads here getting some sort of proof of postage for free at the post office, I am not sure if it would qualify with ebays rules.