eBay error: “The seller has disallowed combined payments and shipping discounts.”

July 14th, 2016

I recently scored a few auctions from an eBay seller who promised combined shipping. Upon requesting a new quote to reflect the combined shipping fee, I got the following error:

“The seller has disallowed combined payments and postage discounts. Please proceed to checkout to complete your purchase.” (Error code 80016)

When researching it, some people pointed out that it’s up to the seller whether they want to allow combined shipping. This was irrelevant in my case since the seller clearly stated in the description that they support combined shipping. Someone even suggested that a seller could lie, and that you would need to contact the seller in advance to get a written confirmation before bidding. However, I’m skeptical that it would be permitted by eBay’s rules to lie about something like that in the item description. Other results were not helpful either,

At last I figured out the probably cause the issue. For whatever reason, I was logged in to ebay.co.uk. When I instead tried logging in at ebay.com I could request a new quote. In my case, they got back within minutes of receiving the request, with a new price.