You may encounter an issue in which orders from buyer located in the US Protectorates /Alaska / Hawaii, may not appear in Hipshipper or worse, they will appear in Hipshipper but the buyer would be charged a very small amount for the shipping.
The reason why this happens is on the eBay/buyer side.
Question 1: Why is this happening?
Question 2: How to avoid/fix it?
Answer 1:Why is this happening?
When the buyer sets up their shipping address, residents of the US Protectorates /Alaska / Hawaii have more than one option for stating their 'country'.
For example, a buyer from Puerto Rico, has the following 2 options to select from:
| 1. Country =Puerto Rico | 2. Country = US, State =Puerto Rico |
 |  |
Most buyers from Puerto Rico will select option 2.
Because the 'Country' was set as 'US', when these buyers place an order on eBay, eBay will consider these order to be 'domestic' order and will apply the 'domestic' part of the policy on the order, meaning the buyer will not quoted nor charged with the added fee that is required for the international shipping.
This will cause a situation where an order will be created on eBay but not created in Hipshipper, the buyer will not be charged for international shipping, and you, the seller, will not have to either ask the buyer for the shipping fee or cancel the order.
Answer 2: How to avoid/fix it?
There are 2 places in which destinations can be excluded in your shipping policies, but for this subject we only care about the 'domestic' part of the shipping policy.
In the 'Domestic' part of the policy - each domestic policy has an 'Excluded shipping locations' section.
When setting up a domestic only policy, all of these destinations should be excluded, however, most sellers do not exclude them and allow orders from places like Puerto Rico, Alaska, US protectorates & Hawaii to be created as 'domestic' orders.
Therefore, you need to edit all your shipping policies and apply the following:
1. Edit the shipping policy and scroll down to the 'Exclude shipping locations' section.
2. Click the 'Edit exclusion list' link and check all the boxes as shows in the screenshot below (including 'Domestic', 'International' and the 'PO box')
3. Save the changes.
** Once these destinations are excluded from the domestic policy, once Hipshipper copies the policy and created the 'HS' international shipping policy, we will use these settings and add our own to it, so that only 'international' orders from those destinations will be honored and created, and 'domestic' orders for the excluded destinations will not be allowed.
Last step: Enable the 'US Protectorates' option in the Hipshipper extension
To achieve that, make sure you are connected to your Hipshipper account and to the eBay store you wish to apply the change to.
1. Open the Hipshipper plugin (make sure you have the latest version installed).
Select which store you wish to set up from the drop down menu and click the "Configure" button
Turn on the 'Ship to US Protectorates' option by checking the box
Click “Setup” to finish the setup.
Now the system will update the settings on your eBay store will be updated, note that this will take up to 24 hours, after which you will be able to get orders from buyer that reside in those remote US locations that have set the address in their account correctly.
If a buyer contacts you asking why you do not ship to their location (for example 'Puerto Rico') you now know to tell them to set their address correctly and they will be able to place the order.
If you require further assistance, do not hesitate to contact us.
The Hipshipper team.