Hello everyone,

Thank you for joining our online workshop on Combined Shipping Discounts. We would like to use this hour to talk about the Combined Shipping Discounts tool, some upcoming enhancements to the tool, and to take your feedback and questions.

We look forward to an interactive session, so please feel free to ask questions.

Suzanna

As a seller, why should you offer Combined Shipping Discounts?

There are several compelling reasons why offering this service can be good for your eBay business:

• When you offer combined shipping discounts, eBay’s buyer messaging educates buyers about your offer, resulting in the potential for more multi-item purchases from buyers
• It is a common e-commerce best practice. Most e-commerce sites offer to combine shipping when more than one item is purchased. Buyers have come to expect this when shopping online.
• Stay ahead of the competition! The more options you can provide to potential buyers, the more your listings will stand out among the competition. Buyers want choices, and offer combined shipping discounts allows you to give a buyer a reason to buy more from you.

We would like to spend part of today’s workshop telling about some exciting upcoming enhancements to the shipping discounts tool, which will give you greater flexibility, better messaging to buyers, and a new promotional tool related to combined shipping.

Upcoming enhancements:

• Greater Flexibility – Offer different discounts for different items. If you offer a mixed product line, you’ll soon be able to set different discount rules for different items. For example, if you sell bowling balls and bowling shoes, might charge more shipping for the heavier items and lower shipping for the lighter items. You’ll soon be able to create custom profiles for your product line(s) and apply custom discount rules, created by you
• Promotional Shipping – Have you ever wanted to offer a promotion on your shipping rates? Soon, you will have the tools to this. Promotional Shipping is the ability to offer a shipping incentive to buyers who shop with you. For example, you could say “Spend $25 and shipping is free!” or “Buy 3 items and shipping is $5!”
• Enhanced buyer messaging and merchandising – Soon eBay will upgrade the messaging buyers see when a seller offers combined shipping discounts. Buyers will see specific messaging telling them what action to take in order to take advantage of the combined shipping discounts offered by sellers.

We hope you find these upcoming enhancements as great tools for running your business on eBay.

As part of the upcoming enhancements to Combined Shipping Discounts, we would like to spend a few minutes describing in more detail the features that are coming soon:

Flexible profiles: Profiles are a way for you to manage combined shipping discounts rules. The profiles are set by you and named by you, so they can be flexible to your business needs. Using the example above, you may have one profile for “heavy” items, such as bowling balls, and one profile for “light items”, such as bowling gloves.

Whether you use flat shipping or calculated shipping, you can apply shipping discount rules using your custom profiles.

Can the cross-promote connections feature be used in conjunction with combined shipping? If so, how?

Hi shaugnyb,

I have a couple of more posts and then we'll get to your great questions!

Suzanna

One of the enhancements we’re excited about is the ability to offer promotional shipping to your buyers.


Promotional Shipping is different because rather than applying discounts per item, it allows you to set a special shipping rate on all of your sales that meet some criteria.

Some examples of promotional shipping offers would be if you could chose to offer “Free Shipping When You Spend $25!” or “Buy 3 items and shipping is only $5!”

We hope you find Combined Shipping Discounts and the upcoming enhancements to be useful tools for your business on eBay. We welcome your feedback and questions