Ebay filtering out items that don't ship to your country

[mikeselectricstuff]

This may not be news to everyone but I just found out that there seems to be no way to do an ebay search to force it to include  items listed as not shipping to your country.

Some US sellers state in the listing that they will usually ship internationally if you contact them first.

This site appears to be able to get round this http://www.geo-ship.com/

[Artlav]

This may not be news to everyone but I just found out that there seems to be no way to do an ebay search to force it to include  items listed as not shipping to your country.

Huh?
In my experience the problem always was to filter OUT the items that won't ship to your country - all the great deals from USA that only go to USA, or all the Chinese sellers who ship "worldwide, except for the following 194 countries".
Are we using the same Ebay?

[TheSteve]

This may not be news to everyone but I just found out that there seems to be no way to do an ebay search to force it to include  items listed as not shipping to your country.

Some US sellers state in the listing that they will usually ship internationally if you contact them first.

This site appears to be able to get round this http://www.geo-ship.com/

i use an alternate way, choose USA as your shipping destination in ebay (list by cheapest or expensive with shipping), and enter zip code 97008 (a forwarder warehouse in portland OR), then select "worldwide" in left side column to see "everything".

everybody loves to sell stuff to USA.

This is what I do. My default shipping address is my US address - it is a must have. If I change it back to my Canadian address ebay doesn't even allow me to bid on many auctions. Those without a US shipping address never see half the great deals available.

[PA0PBZ]

It either just changed or it does work different for me, I see enough items that have a warning "This item does not ship to the Netherlands".
There seems to be something else, maybe in the sellers profile that keeps me from seeing their stuff, where when I click on a direct link to an item I can see it, but when I then click on "sellers other items" I get nothing.

[nctnico]

I go on ebay.com instead of ebay.nl to see items not shipped outside the US. Works fine for me.

[wraper]

This may not be news to everyone but I just found out that there seems to be no way to do an ebay search to force it to include  items listed as not shipping to your country.

Huh?
In my experience the problem always was to filter OUT the items that won't ship to your country - all the great deals from USA that only go to USA, or all the Chinese sellers who ship "worldwide, except for the following 194 countries".
Are we using the same Ebay?

If you are after some cheap crap, then it may me good. But if you need something specialized, it may be pain in the ass. And they filter not only search. Often you see there is nothing in seller's store.  Then change your shipping country, or check without logging in, and it's full of stuff.

[PA0PBZ]

I go on ebay.com instead of ebay.nl to see items not shipped outside the US. Works fine for me.

I never even thought of going to ebay.nl

[wraper]

I go on ebay.com instead of ebay.nl to see items not shipped outside the US. Works fine for me.

It's completely separate thing. You won't see most of the stuff at local ebay site, unless seller pays to list it there. The issue is that many items are hidden even if you go to ebay.com.

[mikeselectricstuff]

I go on ebay.com instead of ebay.nl to see items not shipped outside the US. Works fine for me.

Nope, doesn't work, at least from UK. Even tried logging out & deleting all ebay cookies, no joy.
I think it used to at some point in the past, but not any more.

Pity as sellers probably don't realise they're missing out, as some set "us only" but say in the listing to contact them for international shipping.

For example :
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Spectral-Instruments-PCBA-SCH-FO-Gigabit-I-O-3097-Rev-E-Camera-Interface-Card-/162296449204

Try finding this with a text search.

[mikeselectricstuff]

It could be category specific, and/or depend on exact options seller specifies. Can anyone outside the US find the above example by searching?

[bingo600]

I can confirm.

Search string on ebay.com : Spectral-Instruments-PCBA-SCH-FO-Gigabit-I-O-3097-Rev-E

Nothing shows up if my shipping address is Denmark.

If i change my shipping address to USA - Zip 90210 

I get 4 hits .... Daummmm 

/Bingo

[rollatorwieltje]

Same here, can't find it either.
Weird, if I remember correctly there used to be a search filter for the shipping destinations, now there only seems to be a filter for object location.

[edpalmer42]

I think it depends on how the seller configures his item.  I've never sold on ebay so I'm guessing here.

It seems like if he says he absolutely doesn't ship to anywhere but the U.S., anyone outside the U.S. won't see the item if the shipping address is outside the U.S.  If he leaves it more open, you might see the item with a message that the seller might not sell to you.  Even if you don't log in, or you go to ebay.com, you can still get caught because ebay knows what country you're in by checking your IP address.  It finds me down to the postal code of my ISP.

Dave ran into this when he started selling on ebay.  There's a thread about it.  I looked for his items on many different ebay sites and found nothing.  Looks like he changed something because I can now see two completed auctions for his multimeters.

[TerraHertz]

At the rate Ebay continues to find new ways to make their service function worse, you'd almost think it was deliberate, and the owners actively dislike enabling individuals to trade around the world.

On the topic of ebay hidden filtering, yesterday this post turned up on a site I read:

If you do Ebay, THIS IS HUGE:
 I sell 'better' collectible stamps on eBay. At some point which I still have yet to identify, eBay changed its Seller Protection Racket terms from 'must provide proof of shipping with tracking' to 'must provide proof of delivery'. That cannot be done without using Certified or Registered mail in USA and Registered Mail abroad because postal workers are under no strict obligation to enter tracking data unless the item is Registered.

 Registered Mail is $12.75 plus postage, so any order worth paying that much to ship had better be at least $75-$100 and up. I can do that but it would eliminate all of my normal-sized, $10-$50 customers and markuips would be significantly lower due to volume pricing necessary to move bigger lots. I also suspect that I would end up having to pay for a lot of Registered mail just to get some sales made. On the plus side, there would be less time spent scanning stamps, less time spent listing, and less time spent handling small orders.

 I got ripped off of course--only $83 so far on a package shipped abroad with tracking, but more importantly, as the site now is not safe to sell on without charging for Certified or Registered mail, I had to pull all my listings down to protect the merchandise, and of course cancel my eBay seller store subscription along with it.  Good thing I was going month-to-month and didn't buy a yearlong subscription, or I'd be totally hosed and out months' worth of money for quitting.

 As for alternatives that don't involve eBay or PayPal, the only solution is to set up a website that takes checks and cash and nothing else including no credit cards. I operated that way for many years before going online to sell, but one doesn't get much business that way. The online commercial payment and clearance system has to be an honest one, or things fall apart. It cannot be run like a mafia organization, complete with protection rackets, but that is exactly how it stands at this point in time. I don't think eBay will be doing so well next year. It has become the K-Mart of online retail sites.

 I was going to send a nice donation for the Holidays. I might still be able to, but it will come from somewhere other than my online business, which for now has had to be shuttered due to the widespread eBay/PayPal-induced mail crime. Most likely it will come some time next year once I get up and running again.
THIS IS HUGE - READ THIS IF YOU SKIPPED A PORTION:
 Additionally, the eBay shadowbanning software used to restrict exposure of listings to buyers makes eBay a useless venue unless one uses a so-called Anchor Store. Over two years I figured out that eBay was hiding about 96% of the potential viewing from my store listings by showing them to only one time zone worth of viewers per day, (based on the geographic pattern of actual sales), and that it was giving me just one sale to a new viewer each day and then my listings were shadowbanned from all new contacts for the rest of each day. Each day, I'd get one order, usually early in the morning, and that was it unless a regular customer or watcher bought something.

 I had a Premier Store, (the middle sized one), and have concluded that eBay gives one sale per day to new viewers to Premier Store subscribers, and from talking to other sellers, it seems that eBay gives 10 sales per day to Anchor Stores before shadowbanning them from new viewers. In my case, if one has an Anchor Store, the site might be worth having a store on, but anything less is just a waste of my time and money. Auctions don't seem to be affected by all this. As for a rationale for eBay's behaviour, it would seem that there are far more store subscribers than the market can absorb, so eBay spreads the business around this way in order to keep as many store subscribers as possible. That appears fine and rational, but buyers are being denied choice, and mediocre sellers are allowed to hang on who should not be there.

eBay has beaten the sellers down so far that buying wholesale on eBay is like taking candy from a baby. I have gotten one deal after another after another that in former times I would have decribed as "buys of a lifetime" That is how far down they have beaten the sellers. Thank you for your discussions of shadowbanning and related topics which led me to do the research to successfully figure out how eBay controls and restricts viewing. Along with online research, I used your comments and my experiences of being banned from many news websites to figure it out. For now I do not know what approach I will take from here to get past these globalist mafia scumbags at eBay and PayPal. Thinking ... thinking ....

Best Regards & Happy Holidays, Tom - Borrego Springs, CA"

"Globalist mafia scum" - that about sums up my view of ebay management too.

I use a US address (a reshipper, shipito.com) and log into ebay.com, not ebay.com.au when I'm looking for items in the USA. The Australian ebay.com.au is unspeakably pathetic, with very few categories for technological stuff. Is their thinking "there's low volume demand for such things here", or "we will ensure no market channel for second hand tech equipment ever develops in Australia"?
Personally I suspect it to be the latter.

[AlfBaz]

I often use ebay.com for the same reasons, the .au site doesn't show anything as described above

Just tried the following from the .au site and it works

At the top of search results, underneath the Sort by best match etc is Postage to xxxx, click on the xxxx and select united states.

Then next to the search button at the top of the screen I have an advanced button. In the ensuing screen you scroll down to "Location", click "Located in" radio button and select United States from list box. Scroll down to the end of the page and hit search, bingo

Here's a screen shot using the search term listed above that gave me nothing prior to the above mentioned changes

[Lord of nothing]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Spectral-Instruments-PCBA-SCH-FO-Gigabit-I-O-3097-Rev-E-Camera-Interface-Card-/162296449204

the same here. 

[mikeselectricstuff]

I often use ebay.com for the same reasons, the .au site doesn't show anything as described above

Just tried the following from the .au site and it works

At the top of search results, underneath the Sort by best match etc is Postage to xxxx, click on the xxxx and select united states.

Just tried it - That option appears on ebay.co.uk ( but doesn't find US items even when you enter USA) but no sign of it at ebay.com.
http://www.geo-ship.com/ seems to work a lot better, with the option to select all countries

[Corporate666]

The reason is possibly that eBay tries to force sellers to use their Global Shipping program, which is sold as a great benefit to sellers, but is an absolute ripoff for buyers.  For a seller, you ship the item to a location in the USA and so long as it arrives there, you're golden.

For the buyer, the shipping costs aren't disclosed, and they are very high.  A 1kg item could easily cost $50-80USD to ship to mainland Europe.  eBay constantly tries to turn on the global shipping option, and as soon as it does, it's difficult to get out of it.

Anyway, many sellers don't want to deal with it, so perhaps list items in the USA only and ask buyers to contact them for international.


A note to buyers - using a reshipper to buy items from sellers who say they don't ship outside the USA is screwing over those sellers.  Buyers generally know they are giving up their protection of "item not received" when using a reshipper, so those who do it always just claim the box was empty, or the item was significantly not as described, or was counterfeit or something similar.  Then the seller is on the hook to get it back and is out the money.  It also eliminates the seller's ability to ship using signature delivery.  And reshippers are often notoriously bad for hidden fees and crap service.  So when things go wrong, buyers are quick to just do a chargeback or file a claim - which stiffs the seller who had nothing to do with any of that.  I'm dealing with two such situation now.  A buyer who bought a camera using a reshipper that was not allowed to export to his country.  He ignored the auction listing where I said no reshippers, and it's been nothing but a hassle trying to cancel the auction and get my fees back and he's acting like a petulant child over it.  Another that bid on a Playstation VR headset that was listed that it would be sent signature required.  Of course, he wasn't there to sign for it since he lives in another country - so it's been sitting at the post office and I won't get it back until it's been 30+ days.  At some point, he will file a claim and I will be out the $40+ shipping, because this asshole didn't read or didn't care that I stated US sales only, no reshippers.

So please, if you intend to use a reshipper, ask the seller if they are OK with it first - or at least accept that the sellers is only responsible for the item when it gets to the reshipper, and you take on additional liability for shipping the item back to the USA, even if it wasn't as described or was missing parts or whatever else.

[TerraHertz]

So please, if you intend to use a reshipper, ask the seller if they are OK with it first - or at least accept that the sellers is only responsible for the item when it gets to the reshipper, and you take on additional liability for shipping the item back to the USA, even if it wasn't as described or was missing parts or whatever else.

The reshipper I use, shipto.com, takes good photos of the unpacked item as it arrives at their warehouse, and sends me the photos. Unless there's some reason not to, I often do the feedback to seller at that point. Since although the shipping from the warehouse in CA to me in Sydney takes only 2 to 4 days (and is FAR cheaper than any other means I've ever seen, due to the reshipper's bulk bargaining power and economy of scale), sometimes I leave things at the reshipper for a long while, to consolidate with other items.
I've used them quite a bit, and never had any disputes with sellers. Not one negative in my ebay record.

And, the main point being, that many sellers just refuse to sell overseas for whatever reason. Why should I suffer exclusion due to their bad experience with others, or narrow-mindedness? That goes double for outlets like Amazon USA, that have a general policy of not shipping overseas.
If a seller is being reasonable, I'll explain the process to them. If they just flatly exclude overseas sales, I simply won't inform them it's going overseas. Apart from that I never cheat, so whole classes of problems don't arise.

[mikeselectricstuff]

And, the main point being, that many sellers just refuse to sell overseas for whatever reason. Why should I suffer exclusion due to their bad experience with others, or narrow-mindedness? That goes double for outlets like Amazon USA, that have a general policy of not shipping overseas.
If a seller is being reasonable, I'll explain the process to them. If they just flatly exclude overseas sales, I simply won't inform them it's going overseas. Apart from that I never cheat, so whole classes of problems don't arise.

Which is how this whole thead started - a seller who will ship internationally, but only if you contact them first, to filter out the idiots.

[VK3DRB]

My guess is Australia will be hit with a lot of "Will not ship to Australia" after the government here imposes a mandatory 10% GST on all items purchased overseas from July 1 2017. Better buy your toys early.
I think not shipping to enemies for moral reasons should be encouraged. eg:"WILL NOT SHIP TO RUSSIA"
But unfortunately, the love of money drives everything, including foreign policy these days. And Australia is no exception, if not a classic example where money talks loudest.

[zapta]

I go on ebay.com instead of ebay.nl to see items not shipped outside the US. Works fine for me.

Nope, doesn't work, at least from UK. Even tried logging out & deleting all ebay cookies, no joy.
I think it used to at some point in the past, but not any more.

Side note. The browser's incognito mode is good for clean slate experiments.