| Sun Jan 19 2014 20:57:06 |
eBay Working on International Shopping Cart
By: Ina Steiner
|
Sponsored Link
|
eBay provided some color into its shopping cart last week, revealing that it's working to provide multi-currency capability that will make the cart work across international sites, and said it has plans to add a shopping cart to the eBay Canada website.
"We're hoping to have Shopping Cart on eBay.ca sometime this year - an announcement will be made when this feature is ready to be used," according to a community manager posting on the eBay Canada discussion boards on Wednesday.
The issue was raised by a Canadian seller on a recent "board hour" session held weekly on eBay discussion boards where moderators attempt to answer questions from users.
The eBay moderator said the existing cart available on other international sites such as eBay.com and eBay.co.uk is "currency-specific," so shoppers on those sites cannot add foreign items into their cart. For example, "You wouldn't be able to add items listed in $CAD or (British pounds) to the US Cart," the employee explained. "There's something that we needed to fix in order to launch Cart in Canada since our listings are both in $CAD and $USD."
Once eBay has adds multi-currency capability to its shopping cart, "you'll be able to add any BIN item to the Cart, regardless of what site the seller listed it on, or more specifically, what currency the item was listed in."
The seller who raised the issue explained the problem, writing that shoppers could only purchase one item at a time from any one Canadian seller because of the lack of a shopping cart. That, combined with eBay's removal of "the commit to buy page which forces the person after 1 purchase to pay it with paypal," is, the seller said, "the worst it error I seen in my 10 years of selling on eBay."
The moderator said even without a shopping cart on eBay Canada, "buyers still have the option of paying for multiple items at once. Let's say if a buyer won a few auctions, they can go through checkout in one go. The same with Fixed Price listings - unless they've got Immediate Payment (in which case those items must be paid for individually)."
That sounds easy, but I hear complaints from sellers about difficulties with buyers unable to get combined-shipping discounts - or is that a topic for another blog post?
Given eBay's priority on cross border trade, it's surprising its shopping cart remains site-specific, and quite surprising that eBay Canada has no cart at all.
It seems a good time to ask readers' opinion of marketplace shopping carts - what are your pet peeves, and what are marketplaces doing right when it comes to encouraging shoppers to purchase multiple items?
|
|
|
eBay Working on International Shopping Cart
by: Ming the Merciless 
by: bitbybit 
by: 
by: Anonymous Annie 
by: Puck 
by: ebayisajoke