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At this time I ship on my own Worldwide. (I tried GSP, but removed it when my international sales dropped off). Anyhow, I got a request for a return from a buyer from Germany; his request was based on fit. I approved the return right away expecting it to work like a domestic return. When I looked at the details of the case, I saw that I was expected to refund the buyer the cost of the item AND his original shipping cost of $23.50. What!? This can’t be right! It is for fit!! So I contact eBay for Business on facebook. This is the message I get in return,
“Thanks for sending this to us Sue. The refund page does allow you to refund minus the original shipping cost for remorse returns. Although in order to have the option to withhold original shipping, the seller has to have selected a restocking fee option within the listing form when creating the listing. If no restocking feature was used, it would expect a refund of the full payment. That way both buyer and seller shoulder the cost of a return equally. Unless the seller specifies in his return policy, having to shoulder both original and return shipping could leave a buyer feeling pretty disenchanted. In this case it would be paying $60+ and ending up with $20. Hope that helps.”
This doesn’t make sense because we are eliminating the restocking fee, right? So I wrote back. I’m still waiting while she does some research. But in the meantime I looked on eBay’s policy pages and can’t find anything on international returns. In five years of selling internationally, this is my first return, so it isn’t a huge issue, but I do like to be informed about what is expected, and I’ve never heard of this before. -
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I had a one-on-one phone meeting with a representative of eBay’s GSP in August of 2017. At that time I decided to opt in to GSP but just for the exclusions that I didn’t want to direct ship to. During that time, I shipped directly to Canada and the UK, but also chose to ship to other countries on my own based on whether there was USPS Delivery Confirmation or not.
So I was in GSP for eight months (from August 2017 to March 2018). In all that time, I sold one item through GSP. So maybe a better way of putting it would be that GSP didn’t really increase my sales. I’d have to go exclusive GSP and compare it to months with the similar amount of sales to really do a fair test of whether my international sales increased or decreased.
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Understood. GSP certainly won’t increase international sales, but it certainly makes life easier because they handle all issues once we get the package to the Kentucky warehouse.
The big question is: how much were you selling internationally outside GSP and how many issues did you have? (lost packages, missing tracking, etc)
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I can go back to the beginning of 2016 (I was part time until June of 2016).
I’ve shipped 109 international packages since then.
As for customer issues, I had one customer from Indonesia open an item not received in October of 2015. I refunded him and filed a claim through ShipSaver. They reimbursed me. My customer later told me that the item had arrived. I told him to keep it and not worry about it.
In August of 2017 a buyer from Columbia filed an item not recieved. I didn’t have insurance on this item (cheaper) and had to refund him item cost plus shipping.
That’s it. Until now when this customer is returning his item (unless I can close it at my first opportunity) and I have to pay initial shipping. Which I am fighting btw.
So, I don’t really consider international shipping to be a hardship or challenge. I choose which countries I want to ship to, and I do have quite a few exceptions at the moment. I re-evaluate which countries I’m willing to ship to based on Ship Saver exclusions and USPS international delivery confirmation.-
Cool, then I guess you should just assume you’ll assume a little bit of loss on your international sales. Maybe in this particular case, you just pay for the cost to ship back and be done with it. If not, you start eating up a lot of time and energy fighting the shipping charge.
We went all GSP so we didnt have to deal with this stuff. Since we have been GSP for so long, I cant compare to past sales, but we sell multiple items through GSP each month.
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If an item is broken, damaged or lost, eBay handles everything.
In the past four years of being on GSP, we’re never had a return for “changed mind”. I’d be surprised if not a single buyer wanted to return because of just not liking it. Maybe GSP disallows this? It’s a good question.
All I know is that GSP makes international shipping carefree for us. If we sell less because of it, it’s worth the loss of sales because we have less stress.
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So I heard from eBay for business regarding the seller having to pay initial shipping in the case of a return for fit.
She told me that this is the policy. I asked her where I can find the policy written.
She told me that she is unable to find the written policy.
I said that it wasn’t fair that I’m being charged for a policy that I did not know existed.
She agreed and is giving me a free month extension on my store subscription and is having a help page written up to explain the policy.
It feels good to be right.
And Jay, I spent more time researching my international sales history to answer your questions than I did fighting the shipping charge. LOL. It’s all good though. The numbers speak the truth.
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