eBay Now Ships Goods Internationally, Sellers Only Pay Domestic Postage Fees
The Global Shipping Programme is an easy way for business and private sellers to reach millions more buyers with minimal changes to your current processes. This new programme is designed for sellers who don’t currently offer international postage on listings.
The Global Shipping Programme works by automatically showing international postage costs on your eligible listings to prospective buyers in other countries at no additional cost to you. Your items will be available first to buyers from selected EU countries and later in 2014 to buyers in selected non-EU countries.
I can’t comment on whether or not this is bottom-line profitable for eBay, but I do know that this is spectacularly executed. Obviously, eBay drives more bids, more sellers and more money to flow through its service by encouraging international postage, but that’s not what I want to talk about. It’s the execution that is genius.
As long as a seller shipped domestically before, almost nothing changes in the workflow to participate in this program. eBay takes on the responsibility of not only shipping the items, but also calculating the various regional prices. eBay manages customer information and sends the seller a proxy domestic address, just like a normal domestic auction. The seller posts the package to eBay and eBay ships it to its final international destination.
This means the seller only pays domestic shipping charges to eBay. eBay recoups its expenditure through the additional P&P costs that the buyer is already used to seeing.
In fact, the process is so transparent that eBay can (and is) automatically enrolling sellers into the scheme without being obnoxious. eBay isn’t asking the seller to take on any additional responsibility, so there’s no penalty for the seller to be part of the scheme.
The efficient reallocation of resources here, where eBay is pooling individuals to take advantage of its economies of scale in distribution, is just sublime. This is what you call an elegant product change.