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I hope I've got this wrong, anyway.
I've noticed an unusual trend on Ebay listings, especially with 3d figure sellers. Normally if you buy from one seller you get combined postage, but now, as I mentioned, 3d sellers seem to have went a bit crazy with their postage charges.

An example; I selected 10 models to buy from one seller, and was almost about to click buy when I noticed the total was a bit steep. When I had a look, I found that I was being charged postage on each model. The figure total was about £40, and the seller was wanting another £20 postage. This was an order within the UK, not to the US or Europe. The post service does not have charges as high as this, so I can only assume it is on the seller.

I thought it may be just a one off, but over the past few days I have noticed that many other sellers are doing this also. I did check for combined postage but they did not have it, yet there are other sellers who do so. So is Ebay suddenly charging really high fees or are the sellers pulling a fast one? Someone is making a healthy profit, is it either Ebay or the sellers?

I think its how their store is setup - some combine postage automatically; others you have to reach out after creating the order for a lower postage amount.

I'm aware something like the latter exists, but I've generally only picked up smaller one off things or from stores that already automatically combine postage so I've never gone through the manual postage request for a combined price.

That or ebay has changed a setting somewhere to try and claw back money (somehow?) because they've just made private listings free (in a bid to survive against FB Marketplace)

EBay can be a bit of a minefield to use for sellers. I recently sold a bunch of stuff, if a buyer put seperate items in one shopping basket and paid all at once, eBay would flag this to me. But I needed to manually refund the postage.

If they bought the items one at a time, it didn’t flag it. So if I wasn’t careful, I could package things up separately and find they were going to the same buyer.

End of the day though, it’s up to the seller if they want to offer combined postage, and I can understand why some items would need to be sent separately, or wouldn’t be economical to combine into one package due to size limits on parcels etc.

The Global Shipping Program has vastly increased the cost of buying overseas in the last few years. I'm in Australia and I used to regularly buy from the UK and USA, but not anymore. Postage for a single mini is often $40 (~20 GBP).

 Cap'n Facebeard wrote:
The Global Shipping Program has vastly increased the cost of buying overseas in the last few years. I'm in Australia and I used to regularly buy from the UK and USA, but not anymore. Postage for a single mini is often $40 (~20 GBP).

This is my sentiment as well. It used to be possible that sometimes a kit was cheaper on UK eBay than US. Nowadays almost no oversees model purchase is worth it. Even a tiny bits order like a gun or arm has $15 postage from UK to US

That's true - there's been a few book Kickstarters that I've had to pass on because the postage from the USA for a one-off was more than the book and there were well into the $30-60 range.

Retail seems to be a little less affected, or at least bulk shipping still manages to achieve sane local prices; but I bet its hitting the firms hard somewhere to achieve it.

Sadly the pandemic put a LOT of prices on things up and since then many haven't come down.

With regards to Ebay tho, the GSP was put in before COVID, and is actually just another way for ebay to gouge people.

A lot of overseas sellers I've messaged are unaware that the postage cost is so high from the buyers' viewpoint. A lot of the time they think they are only charging a small, old-fashioned amount, but that is just ebay's cost for posting to their distribution centre. The overseas customer is paying 4x that amount to ebay.

Slipstream wrote:
I hope I've got this wrong, anyway.
I've noticed an unusual trend on Ebay listings, especially with 3d figure sellers. Normally if you buy from one seller you get combined postage, but now, as I mentioned, 3d sellers seem to have went a bit crazy with their postage charges.

An example; I selected 10 models to buy from one seller, and was almost about to click buy when I noticed the total was a bit steep. When I had a look, I found that I was being charged postage on each model. The figure total was about £40, and the seller was wanting another £20 postage. This was an order within the UK, not to the US or Europe. The post service does not have charges as high as this, so I can only assume it is on the seller.

I thought it may be just a one off, but over the past few days I have noticed that many other sellers are doing this also. I did check for combined postage but they did not have it, yet there are other sellers who do so. So is Ebay suddenly charging really high fees or are the sellers pulling a fast one? Someone is making a healthy profit, is it either Ebay or the sellers?

If you're considering buying multiple items from one seller, contact them and ask if they do combined shipping charges. Some will, some won't.

I now try to avoid making bits purchases from eBay sellers in the US. The postage charges are just brutal - especially considering the small items involved. The UK is much better, at least to where I am. Unfortunately, the sellers in the US usually have the biggest ranges of bits.

 Cap'n Facebeard wrote:
The Global Shipping Program has vastly increased the cost of buying overseas in the last few years. I'm in Australia and I used to regularly buy from the UK and USA, but not anymore. Postage for a single mini is often $40 (~20 GBP).

This is my issue and might be some of the issue for the OP's recent seller. I've sold on ebay off and on for nearly 20 years. Postage is why I only ship/sell to the continental USA anymore. I do free shipping for quick sales, and there is too much of a price difference between USA and the rest of the world.

The global shipping program is also kind of annoying to find and turn off from the seller side. I had it enabled on my account and didn't know about it until I started getting a pile of weird buyers that kept going to the same address.

If the seller has 'immediate payment' set on for buy it now purchases they can't do combined shipping

(and it's defaulted to on so many new and occasional sellers won't even know about it as an issue)

you also can't combine postage on anything bought via a 'best offer'

and just to make things even more annoying as a buyer there is a recuring glitch where the 'request a total' function never actually sends a message to the seller (even though it says it does)

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:


and just to make things even more annoying as a buyer there is a recuring glitch where the 'request a total' function never actually sends a message to the seller (even though it says it does)

I doubt that's a glitch.