All I wanted was to do a little online holiday shopping.

In an effort to save time, energy, and a trip to the mall, each year I take my holiday shopping list - typically consisting of books, CDs and DVDs - and devote a couple of hours of serious "Internet time" to sitting down and shopping online.

I can usually fulfill my entire list on Amazon in about 15 minutes. What takes the other hour and 45 minutes is my compulsion to compare prices on other sites, like eBay Express.

Although it's hard to touch Amazon's free shipping on orders over $25, many sellers on eBay Express offer shipping discounts for multiple purchases. It can add up to tidy savings when purchasing four or five items from one seller.

So I figured that I would give eBay a chance to compete for my money. I added 9 DVDs to my eBay Express shopping cart from four different sellers. The total cost came to $135.45 - $92.31 for DVDs and $43.14 for shipping. Two of the vendors from whom I purchased offered combined shipping discounts.

One offered $5.50 for first item and $2.99 for each additional item. I selected four DVDs from this seller. The other charged $4.75 for shipping and $1.50 for each additional item. I purchased three DVDs from this seller.

Using the lightning-quick mathematical skills that allow me to outperform most 3rd graders, I deduced that my shipping costs from these two sellers would be $22.22 ($14.47 + $7.75). Instead, it was $36.25 ($22 + $14.25) an overcharge of $14.03.

I went back to review the TOS on the auction descriptions, and read, "Please note that payment must be combined in order to receive the combined shipping rate." Hmmm, could this be the problem? I had purchased multiple items from the same seller - in fact, I had purchased multiple items from two sellers, and the shipping discounts still were not reflected.

Confused, I decided to seek help from a very nice virtual customer service person named Julieanne, using the live help button. The conversation went something (but not exactly) like this:

Julieanne: How may I assist you?

Me: I have a question about checking out on express...

Julieanne: I'll be glad to assist you with this.

Me: I've selected several items from sellers that give shipping discounts when multiple items are purchased. Those discounts are not being reflected in my checkout page

Julieanne: One minute please while I look into this for you.

Julieanne: I can see that there are different items from different merchants in your shopping cart. Shipping discounts are only offered per merchant. so if you are purchasing from more than one merchant, combined shipping won't be applied. I request you to remove the items from other merchants from the shopping cart and first complete checkout for the items from one merchant to get the shipping discount. Then you can go ahead with the checkout for items from other merchants.

Me: Even if I have purchased multiple items from one merchant, the shipping discount won't be applied? So I have to check out twice?

Julieanne: It seems that the merchant has not selected the "Offer shipping discount" option in their eBay preferences. I request you to get in touch with the merchant and ask them to activate this option. Once they do that, you'll get shipping discount at the time of checkout.

Julieanne: May I provide you with the steps how to contact the seller?

Me: No, that's ok I'm familiar with that process. I appreciate the explanation.

Julieanne: You're welcome. Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Me: Yes, can you recommend a good psychiatrist? EBay is making me crazy.

OK, I didn't really say that last part - but I did think it.

I had actually received two answers from Julieanne. Either eBay Express' shopping cart did not know how to apply shipping discounts when purchasing from multiple sellers, and I would break out my cart and check out multiple times, or some eBay sellers did not know how to select the proper settings when listing their items. I began to get the sinking feeling that what started out as a pleasant little shopping spree was turning into something I was obliged to research and write about. I guess I was right.

I'm an experienced eBay user - as both a buyer and seller - and I've been around the block enough to know that if there's a problem affecting a couple of sellers, it's probably a more widespread issue. Problems rarely happen in a vacuum on eBay. I really felt like abandoning this cart, and simply taking the sales to Amazon. But instead, I put my reporter's hat on, took Julieanne's advice and contacted one of the sellers.

By phone.

I explained that I was a reporter, and related the combined shipping issue to them. Turns out that they were aware of the problem. They said they did have their preferences set properly and had reported the issue several times to their eBay representative over the past two months. The rep told them that eBay techs could not re-create the problem, and that the issue must have been isolated to them. The seller was very pleasant, and explained that eBay Express drives lots of buyers to their products. They also told me that they process about 15 refunds daily because of this combined shipping issue.

As a seller, I'd find it annoying to have to process that many refunds each day. I'd also be concerned about number of buyers simply abandoning the shopping cart because the shipping numbers don't add up correctly. If I were a normal person, I probably wouldn't take the time to email the seller to receive the shipping discount that is clearly outlined in the listing. I'd probably look elsewhere for my items.

But I'm clearly not normal, and my curiosity was getting the better of me. Was this a seller mistake, or an eBay glitch? Why had it affected both sellers that I wanted to purchase from? So I decided to take it up directly with eBay. I explained the situation to my eBay PR contact, and sent him a PDF file of my shopping cart, so that he could see exactly what I was seeing.

About 2 days later, I received this response:

Thanks for your patience. After a thorough review we believe we have isolated the issue and are currently reaching out to the sellers so we can work with them on resolving the problem.

It seems the issue lies with how the discounts were set up in the system, not with how the calculations were made. One of the sellers had discounts set on some of their items, but not all of them. For another seller, the discounts were not set up at all.

While the listings may have indicated a multi-item shipping discount in the description, the sellers did not set them in the fields where shipping is calculated.

Give me a call if you need further clarification, thank you.

Well that was interesting, so one of Julieanne's answers was correct. I decided to call the seller back, and see if he knew this. And as luck would have it, he did. EBay had contacted him not long before I called. He sheepishly admitted to me that his settings were incorrect. No problem - so BOTH sellers in my cart had incorrectly filled out their listing forms?

It piqued my curiosity enough to fill several eBay Express shopping carts with items from various sellers who all offered combined shipping discounts in their listings. It took me five tries to get the shopping cart to finally recognize that I had a discount coming.

Out of the eight sellers I tested, only two had evidently had selected the proper settings to allow the shipping discounts to show up on eBay Express. But I wasn't quite through. The last seller was also someone I was acquainted with - and I just happened to have his phone number.

I called him, and we walked through the shopping cart together while he checked the settings on his listing software. His third-party management software was set to give multi-shipping discounts, as were his eBay Express settings. He was surprised to discover that not only was the eBay Express shopping cart not displaying his combined shipping discounts, but it was also adding extra insurance charges.

I decided to relay this information back to eBay. My contact did not know why 75% of the sellers I had tried failed to display the correct combined shipping discounts. He had no estimated time for the issue to be resolved. He did acknowledge, that from a buyer's perspective, "I would think it would be confusing. It's clearly not ideal."

Confusing to say the least. Was it that sellers needed to be educated better in the use of eBay Express checkout? After checking the eBay boards, this problem had been reported for months - all the way back to April, when eBay held a workshop entitled, "Attract Repeat Buyers with New Combined Shipping Discounts."

The last seller I spoke with certainly seemed to know his way around the settings. Was it related to eBay's well-documented shipping calculator glitch? I wondered how many other buyers hadn't noticed the shipping error, and paid more. Or how many HAD noticed the shipping cost error and simply abandoned their cart? How much lost revenue were sellers experiencing because of this? And did they even realize it?

Here was the real issue. I had just spent 3 days with my shopping cart in limbo on eBay Express because it kept trying to rip me off. Seller mistake, eBay glitch - it really didn't matter. I had entered the site as a consumer, not a consumer advocate. All I was trying to do was checkout.

This was a problem for eBay and eBay sellers to figure out. And probably sooner than later with the holiday shopping season in full swing, and a shopping cart feature headed to eBay's main site in the near future.

I had a shopping list to fulfill. On Amazon.

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Have you experienced issues with eBay Express checkout as a buyer or seller? We'd like to hear about them here: http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2007/10/1192416492.html