@lyndal1838 wrote:
It has been happening to Australians buying from the UK too.....the first time it happened to me was about October 2014 when I was buying diaries for Xmas. It happened again in 2015 so obviously nothing has been done.
And to make matters worse the Shopping Cart only works intermittently....it cost me an extra $10 shipping because I could not combine two higher value items from Bing Lee when using the discount voucher last week.
The UK is another site where FVF is charged on whatever postage the buyer pays, so when a buyer can't access combined postage discounts, eBay gets to maximise their fees - if I were a more suspicious person, I'd assume that's why it hasn't been fixed yet..... >_>
Aside from eBay glitches and the like, though, there are a couple of reasons a seller's discount won't apply automatically in the cart. One is that the items have different discount profiles (a seller can set flat rate or calculated postage discounts and create multiple profiles for both, but only one can be selected per listing, so if one listing has $0 extra per item - noted in green in the postage and payments tab - and another has something different like 50c extra per item, the full P&H will be charged on each in the checkout).
The other circumstance is when there are different postage services selected as the default. Even if I use the same postage discount on different items, if I use 'standard postage' on one, and 'standard postage - registered' on another, the discount won't be applied at checkout, so that's a couple of things that can sometimes explain why they don't work.
Promotional postage discounts should always work no matter what, as they apply to all items that have the rule selected, and they override flat or calculated postage discounts, but it can be hard to tell sometimes what's being used by the seller (promotional postage rules are usually percentages off postage totals, or free post when a certain number of items are purchased, or a specific dollar value reached).
), they would fix the whole BIN / cart / combining mess by simply removing the BIN button so there is only 'add to cart', and allowing 'request quote' wherever postage discounts aren't (or can't be) automatically applied, and the buyer could then proceed through checkout and buy the items (as it is now, even if you get the 'request invoice' function, it BINs all of the items. Since it seems they're moving toward immediate payment, or at least items remaining available until paid for, I think something like that would be the neatest solution while still allowing sellers to use multiple postage services on individual listings and the like). 
