Twice I left it on accidentally and someone not in the US won the item. Both buyers refused to jump through whatever hoops were required on their end so I had to re-list one item and sell the other to the second-place bidder.

Agreed. I never bid on these auctions. Mainly because ebay wants to charge customs duties on items that do not attract such duties!

Yes, Ebay automatically charges the custom fees (probably because they are able to keep a percentage of them) and a fee for collecting the custom fees and also extra handling for the package, etc.  

In general, I only get charged customs on less than 5% of packages I receive from the US shipped by USPS.

You can turn off the eBay international shipping feature in your profile settings.  I Googled the instructions and there are two or three checkboxes you have to un-check to disable it.  My auctions now default to no international shipping.  I'd tell you what to do, but it was about six months ago and I don't remember.

The other options is to make one listing and save it as a template.  All your settings should be saved when you use the template for listings.

Brian2112 and tool - thanks!  That helped alot!  +1 to both of you!

~throwi

recent experience with this. Seller had BINs on several items that I purchased. There was no way to purchase without paying immediately including the shipping price per item. I pm'd the seller and he said he'd combine shipping. I purchased all the items and the seller then did in fact combine shipping, though I didn't know that this global shipping nonsense had him forward the won items to some ebay location. He told me the items were mailed in a single envelope, and I waited for my paypal refund from him.

The seller obviously didn't understand this global shipping default on his items and I've never used it before so I was completely unaware of the "consequences" of buying items under the program. So the ebay location then "uncombined" the items they received from him and mailed them to me...effectively charging me single shipping prices on all the items.

Moral of the story is, it looks like there's no way for a seller to combine shipping on multiple items using the "global shipping program"...
at least that's what the ebay customer service said.

Is ebay unaware that buyers purchase multiple items from the same seller on occasion?

btw, the seller somehow never saw/received the shipping amounts I paid on the auction. So I think that ebay must be extracting/sequestering that amount..I guess the seller never sees that money?

Are you talking about on eBay.com, or on the system here?  

It's nothing I've looked at before, but I can take a peek and see if I can identify sellers using the GSP -- then give you a switch to flip to block them.

Foul

grodog wrote in EBay Global Shipping:Is there any way to block/ignore sellers who use the Global Shipping Program?

I had some excellent comms with a UK seller on some minis, but he didn't inform me he was using eBay's GSP until we were sorting through details after his auctions closed (and I won about 6 minis).  Unfortunately he wasn't able to combine shipping in a meaningful way, and the shipping was going to be close to 60 GBP for 6 minis.

So, is there some way to ID sellers using Global Shipping, and then to prevent those seller's items from showing up in my search results?

Allan.

Wow, that is a good request! I second that. It still amazes me why any seller worth their salt would really want to waste their time with GSP, as it adds needless time and expense to everyone involved. There's a certain feeling of control you have as a seller, when you are doing your own customs forms---and it's really simple, since the software provided on eBay (through Pitney Bowes, I believe)  automates about 90% of it based on the data received from the page when you print out the shipping label. Just beware of buyers claiming they are being needlessly charged for customs at their end and trying to scam you into refunding "customs fees" *coughcoughcougarrinardcough*

In the meantime, we're stuck with visually searching on eBay for sellers who don't do the GSP waste of time and money :/

querion wrote in EBay Global Shipping:I have to wonder if the issues I hear so many complain about with GSP are destination specific (good for Canada, bad for elsewhere), or package size / weight specific, but my experience has been the exact opposite, and I will search out those using GSP when possible.

All of the times I've been screwed by GSP have been single books or miniatures, so my hunch is that the size is a large part of it.

(And the seller graciously cancelled the transactions I had won, which was nice).  

Allan.