Combining shipping orders
You may come across buyers that purchase multiple items from your store. To improve their shopping experience and to encourage them to buy more, you can allow combined shipping on their orders. Shipping multiple quantities will not necessarily increase the shipping cost. This is popular amongst eBay cross border sellers who are selling lightweight and small items like CD/DVD, small stationery and fishing accessories.
However, in order to do this, you must first disable the ‘Require Immediate Payment’ setting.
- Go to Seller Hub > Listings > Business Policies
- Choose the default payment policy that you are currently using
- Uncheck “Require Immediate Payment”
Buyers can only benefit from one type of promotion. Therefore, you will not be able to simultaneously offer other discounts/promotions such as “buy 5 or more, get free shipping”.
Take note:, If this payment option is disabled, you must ensure that your buyers have already made payment before shipping out orders.
To help your buyer save on shipping costs, you can combine their orders into one. Once this has been set up, buyers will see an option to combine their orders after they have added your items to cart.
STEP 1: Go to Account settings > Shipping preferences
STEP 2: Navigate to Shipping Settings > Allow combined payment and shipping > Combined payments and click Edit
STEP 3: Tick to allow and choose the time period to combine payments.
Sample scenario:
Buyer purchases 2 CDs.
Seller charges USD6 shipping cost per CD.
If the buyer purchases the 2 CDs without asking for a revised total, they will end up paying a total shipping cost of USD12 during the checkout.
Combined shipping process flow:
Buyer adds the 2 CDs to their cart.
On the request total page, the buyer can leave a message asking the seller for the shipping costs to be combined.
The seller will receive the request via eBay messages.
While waiting for the invoice, the item will be under the buyer’s unpaid items list.
Once the seller has agreed to the new combined shipping charge, the buyer will be informed by eBay via email.
The updated shipping charge (USD6) will now be reflected in the buyer’s shopping cart and they can proceed to checkout.
To send an invoice for combined orders:
- In Seller Hub, select Orders.
- Select Send invoice next to one of the items you’d like to include in the invoice.
- On the next page, we display all items purchased by that buyer. Remove the check from any items you don’t want to include in the invoice.
- Add shipping charges.
- Enter a message to the buyer (optional) and select the payment methods you accept.
- To preview the invoice, select Preview invoice before sending.
- Select Send invoice.
