Glitch: extra charges when revising listings
June 30, 2009
We’re hearing from a few sellers today that extra charges are being added onto their listings when revising – sometimes for the unsolicited addition of Gallery Plus @ £2.85, and sometimes for random and unfathomable amounts, some in excess of £5. If you’re revising listings today, keep an eye on that “revised fees” box. People who’ve spoken to Support have been told to end the listing and request a fee credit.
Who needs bubble wrap…
May 23, 2009
It’s a tempation familiar to many eBay sellers: your buyer just doesn’t want to pay postage and packing, and for a fleeting moment, you want to slap a stamp on the item itself, and stick it in the post box. Now one Swedish artist (who, as far as I know, doesn’t sell on eBay) has tried just that. Eric Ericson has been testing the limits of European postal services by sending a variety of objects just as they are, with no packaging, to an address in Berlin.
He told Wired magazine that he “wanted to see what was possible to send, and what would arrive”. The most difficult item was a mannequin, sent in separate parts, while “food is easy; you just put it in a mailbox.” Eric has published a book, To Mr Cheng, showing the items he sent.
eBay gunning for the wrong sellers
May 19, 2009
Let’s play a game. Can you tell the difference between these two items?
How about these two?
Just one more. This one’s a little tricky:
If you spotted that only one of each pair was a gun, well done: you did better than eBay UK. Numerous sellers over the last few days have reported receiving warnings that they may be in breach of eBay UK’s firearms policy when listing a range of entirely innocent items: lilac blouses, biscuit cutters, inflatable canoes, keyrings and bras are a few more of the restricted listings. The items can take several hours to show up in search, and sellers are being left wondering if their policy compliance – and hence seller discounts – will be affected.
Whatever filter has been added to eBay UK recently seems to have a powerfully broad vocabulary: videos which have been “shot”, “barrel” and “tube” shaped beads and “magazines” have all fallen foul of it, and may cause listings to be hidden in search. eBay support had said that they were aware of the problem and that it would be remedied by yesterday, but it seems that sellers are still getting warnings when listing items which have nothing to do with firearms.
Though Support have advised some sellers to wait a few days before listing items, the range of restricted items is so random and varied that it seems like just about any item any of us care to list might get picked up, so “don’t list that one” isn’t much of a solution. So while we wait for the fix, leave us a comment with your most ridiculous restricted item 
With thanks to the following for pictures: beige sweater, bonsai tree, pendant, gun, gun, gun.
eBay shows dirty linen in public
May 12, 2009
Amanda from Dragon Lady Silver had a bit of a shock when perusing eBay UK’s home page yesterday. In amongst the “tea” and “coffee” recommended searches, it also suggested she might be interested in “stained knickers” and “soiled underwear”. Amanda assures me that these bear no relation to anything she’s been looking for previously on eBay!
Nevertheless, it seems that if you’ve looked at underwear, this may be one of the searches eBay throws up: Amanda *had* looked at some faked designer underwear mentioned in a forum thread. Would that be enough to produce this kind of search result? Only eBay knows; presumably they have some kind of filter to remove illegal and prohibited items from front page search results, but that filter isn’t working properly here. As Amanda says, it’s a lovely first impression for anyone new to the site.
Click to embiggen
“NARU” not showing in SMP
May 10, 2009
Just a quick heads up for anyone with orders awaiting payment – check your buyer hasn’t been NARUed. This morning I went to file a UID on an outstanding order, only to be given my fees back immediately as the buyer’s no longer registered on eBay. There’s nothing to indicate this is the case in SMP. Unregistered buyers used to have a little note by their transaction indicating the change in status, but it seems this is no longer the case.
This particular transaction is on eBay.fr so I’m not sure how widespread the problem is, or whether this is a glitch or eBay deeming the information no longer necessary. But if you’re staring at unpaid sales, it might be worth a check whether the buyers are still registered or not. Those FVFs won’t refund themselves
eBay’s email changes cause confusion for sellers
May 4, 2009
It seems eBay have made some changes to their sold item emails in the last few days, which may cause some confusion to sellers. TameBay reader Kate from Cat’s Eye Designs forwarded me an example from one of her own sales:
Sale price: £2.99
Quantity: 6
Quantity sold: 3
Quantity remaining: 3
Buyer: XXXXXXX
Kate points out that the quantity sold to the buyer in question was 2, and that 3 is in fact the total quantity sold from this listing. On another transaction, where the buyer had bought a single item, the email read:
Sale price: £3.50
Quantity: 11
Quantity sold: 9
Quantity remaining: 2
Again, the email reflects the total quantity sold from the listing, not the number purchased on this individual sale.
It probably bears saying again; if you’re relying on any single set of emails for sales information, you’re going to run into problems sooner or later. Better at least to reconcile eBay with PayPal, and to be getting your information from the site, not relying on mail.
And if anyone from eBay is reading this, could we have the “send invoice” button back please? I notice there’s a yellow button to go to My eBay, so I assume this hasn’t been removed in an anti-phishing move to get people to stop clicking things in emails. So it seems like yet another case of the people who design things at eBay have never used the site. It wasn’t broken, it didn’t need fixing, please, let’s have it back.
The free Adcommerce that wasn’t
April 8, 2009
“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” I say this a lot about things connected with eBay, but it’s about time I learned to take my own advice.
Last month, like many sellers on eBay UK, I received a voucher for £50 of free play on eBay’s Adcommerce, the new in-search advertising program. Not to rehash all the discussion we had at that time, my thought on Adcommerce was that I had £50 of free advertising; even if they weren’t providing me with any conversion data, I would at least have a play with it, because at current click-through rates, my £50 would last me until somewhere around Christmas.
Dear Reader, how wrong I was. This morning, I received an invoice from eBay Adcommerce for €10.42. I mentioned this to Chris: don’t you have a credit as well? he asked. No, I don’t. We compared invoices: his has the total due balanced by an equal credit. Nothing to pay. Mine has no credit.
I wish I could act surprised by this, but eBay and I have a long, long history of their promotions just not working (long-time readers of the PowerSeller board might remember the “free anchor shop” they charged me £450 to have). There’s probably some glitch associated with me being in France and eBay being all over the shop, so I just mention it, in case anyone else is in the same position and gets charged for something they’d been told was free.
Difficulties accessing eBay site reported
March 10, 2009
eBay members in the UK and US are reporting issues accessing the eBay site. It seems likely that these difficulties are related to an announcement made recently regarding “a problem with a major internet carrier“.
Latest eBay information will be reported here, but I’ll update this post if/when I find out more.
Update: This issue is apparently resolved.
Free subtitles to run until Feb 09 on GTC listings
January 7, 2009
It’s not unheard of for eBay to make a mistake, but they’ve really gone to town on the subtitle promotion for which sellers who participated are benefiting.
Having initially disallowed Good Til Canceled (GTC) items from the free Subtitle promotion, which ran for the whole of December, eBay allowed users to include free subtitles on GTC listings. They then announced they’d refund any Subtitle fees incurred up until 15th January at which point sellers would be able to remove subtitles from GTC listings (even if they had sales) so that they wouldn’t be charged for Subtitle on subsequent relists.
Today eBay have announced that they’ve been unable to update the site to enable users to remove Subtitles from GTC listings and this will now be enabled by 3rd February. Consequently the fees for Subtitles on GTC listings will be refunded for all qualifying GTCs on relist for the period 1st January – 9th February 2009.
So what started as a promotion for December will no effectively benefit sellers for up to three months. Any GTC listings launched with Subtitle between 1st and 11th December will get two renewals with Subtitle and a full 90 days benefit. All sellers need remember to do is to remove the Subtitle prior to the listing renewing after 9th February.
Skype moves Australia to Europe
December 22, 2008
We all know where Australia is right? The Antipodes, that’s the other side of the world. Down under. You know, where the wallabys and kangaroos hang out with Matilda.
Well not any more, Skype has moved it conveniently close to the UK, just South of Germany and the Czech Republic. Skype illustrate how Skype To Go works saying “Sam’s based in the US, so he’s got a US Skype To Go number. His family is back in Australia“, with an image of the call hopping across the Atlantic into Europe.
Not quite Australia, Sydney is about 10,000 miles away from Vienna in Austria, Skype need to get their geography books out.
Via IT Wire
PayPal glitch ‘cancels 3 year old echeques’
December 5, 2008
Several eBay sellers have reported receiving emails from PayPal earlier today, notifying them that echeques could not be processed by their buyers’ banks, and they should not post the goods. Not so unusual, except that the transactions in question were, according to PayPal, from 2005 and 2006.
My chum Tracey from Rainbowcraft had an email telling her that an echeque for £2.19 from 4th March 2006 had been cancelled. Aside from the sheer nonsense of taking two and a half years to tell a seller they’re not getting paid, the problem was that, digging back through her PayPal account, Tracey couldn’t find any sign of this transaction.
Further digging in fact revealed that there *was* a cancelled echeque to go with the buyer details PayPal had supplied, but it was from July 2008. Still far too far back to be being notified of cancellation now, but better than March 2006. Other sellers have confirmed they have the same problem. As Tracey says, thank goodness it was only £2.19 – but it could so easily have been £219.
This is just another in a long line of PayPal glitches over the last few weeks. With eBay doing their best to push buyers and sellers towards only using PayPal as a payment method on eBay, it’s about time the system became a lot more reliable.
PayPal payments incorrectly showing as pending
December 3, 2008
eBay announced last night that there is another glitch in communication between My eBay and PayPal. Some payments may by showing as “pending” on sellers’ My eBay pages, even though the payment is in fact cleared through PayPal.
If you have payments showing as pending in My eBay, it’s worth signing into your PayPal account to check their status.
eBay crashes, PayPal reverse payments
November 30, 2008
eBay appear to be having a few problems tonight with many site functions returning “Sorry, that’s not working right now” messages.
Whilst this is frustrating for sellers trying to send invoices what’s even worse is that buyers PayPal payments are being reversed. Sellers are reporting payments appearing in their PayPal account followed immediately by a reversal. At the same time the item the buyer thought they had purchased appears back on eBay as a live listing and not as a sold ended item.
If you normally rely on PayPal payment emails for shipping make sure you double check before dispatching goods tomorrow that the item has actually been sold and paid for.
If you’re a buyer double check that you have successfully bought and paid for the item that you think you’ve won.
(P.S. eBay… The “Sorry page” has a link to the “eBay Announcement Board for major system issues and changes“, it’s not got a single post on it yet…..)
Free listing for DVDs and video games on eBay.fr 2nd December
November 28, 2008
eBay France are holding a free listing day this coming Tuesday, 2nd December, in the DVDs and video games categories. The promotion is valid for auction and BIN listings; other fees are charged as normal. Nothing is specified about French residence or seller status.
Checkout glitch estimates delivery yesterday
November 21, 2008
delivers within -1 day
eBay staff on various forums have been made aware of the problem but don’t seem yet to have any information regarding a fix. One PowerSeller support rep actually told a seller that the one day delivery information came from the Royal Mail website. I’m fairly certain the RM website doesn’t say anywhere that parcels will be delivered the day before they were dispatched however.
At this time of year with delivery times becoming more critical, it’s a glitch eBay need to fix as a matter of urgency, and if it can’t be fixed immediately, the estimated delivery time needs to be removed until it *is* fixed. For sellers, in the meantime, communicating with buyers about actual delivery times becomes more crucial than ever.
For any sellers who do wish to stick to the suggested delivery schedule, you can purchase your tardis on eBay.
PayPal glitch undercharges on 3rd party checkouts
November 15, 2008
There is a glitch with PayPal which is undercharging for carriage on 3rd party checkouts. The glitch appears to be affecting sales where the buyer selects optional insurance on top of the normal postage cost. PayPal appear to be changing the total and not charging for the insurance the buyer has selected.
PayPal and eBay have identified the problem which first exhibited itself at around 11am on Thursday and are working on a fix. They aim to get a solution completed and rolled out as soon as possible and will continue working on it over the weekend.
Buyers who don’t select optional insurance are not being affected with postage correctly charged and the glitch only appears to affect those using 3rd party checkout solutions. Sadly many of those using 3rd party checkout solutions such as ChannelAdvisor are amongst the biggest sellers on eBay who may have hundreds if not thousands of incorrectly charged transactions.
PayPal glitch stops seller withdrawals
November 6, 2008
Sorry, an error occurred after you clicked the last link
Some sellers have had success simply refreshing the page: it then flips back to the normal withdrawal process. This worked for me but not for Chris, so it’s probably worth trying again later if it doesn’t succeed the first time. There’s no word of a fix from PayPal yet, but if there’s any official comment, I’ll update this post.
Featured first double dips on fees
November 5, 2008
It appears that there is a glitch on items using the Featured First enhancement where users are getting billed again for the feature if they make revisions to their listing.
The glitch has appeared on 30 day listings for which a 7 day Featured First enhancement was applied. When a revision is made (even a simple revision like adding more inventory to the listing) users have been charged a second time, but for a full 30 day Featured First fee.
eBay advised users to run long duration listings and to adjust the quantity as stock sells and is replenished but double dipping on fees, changing the Featured First option from a 7 day to a 30 day and re-charging, shouldn’t be happening.
If you have been using the Featured First enhancement and have subsequently adjusted the quantity available on a listing, check your invoice and make sure you haven’t been over charged.
PayPal glitch threatens to cancel echeque payments
October 25, 2008
PayPal echeques are a pain point at the best of times. Buyers often think they’ve paid and don’t understand why sellers don’t ship immediately. Sellers are frustrated at having to wait up to 10 days for the funds to clear and when an echeque doesn’t clear it’s often days until it fails and they have to request the buyer to repay by an alternative method.
Now the latest glitch from PayPal is an email informing sellers that their echeque payment will be canceled if they don’t “claim the funds”.
Dear Chris Dawson,
Claim your funds
You received 4.99 GBP from xxxxxxx@xxx.xxx on 23 Oct. 2008. If you do not claim your funds by 21 Nov. 2008, this transaction will be cancelled and the money will be returned to xxxxxxx@xxx.xxx’s account.
Log in to your PayPal account to view the details of this transaction.
You are being asked to manually claim this money because:
You are one of our high-volume customers. We ask PayPal users who receive more than $10,000.00 USD per month to complete our Supplemental Merchant Information form.
To fill out the form, click the link below:
https://www.paypal.com/uk/MERCHANT
The information you provide helps us protect the integrity of our network. Payments sent to your PayPal account will be held as ‘Pending’ until you complete this form.
If you have questions about this transaction, log in to your PayPal account and click on History found towards the top of the page. Click on the details of the transaction in question for more information, or to accept or refuse this payment.
Yours sincerely,
PayPal
The echeque detailed is due to clear on the 31st October, in the mean time there is nothing that can be done to “claim” the payment or to get the echeque cleared quicker.
The email, although addressed by name, resembles spam and has the one thing that PayPal advise they never to do – it contains a clickable link requesting users to log into their account to update their information. Quite frankly all the time PayPal send emails with links in it’s no wonder that unsuspecting users fall for phishing emails. Using US dollars in emails to UK customers makes the email look even more suspicious.
Reporting the email to PayPal elicited the response “That is a spoof email. We would never ask you to fill out your business information on a link. We would ask you to log on to your account and follow steps to complete”. Sadly the emails aren’t spoofs – they’re addressed to the correct name containing details of a genuine transaction and the link is to a genuine PayPal page, they’re just a PayPal glitch.
PayPal have a new website intended as a fun interactive way to learn about online safety with a test. The correct answer to how phishers prey on victims is “Describing threats to your account and stating you must authenticate your information immediately followed by a link”.
In order for the advice to be taken seriously PayPal themselves should never send emails requesting users to click links and update their information.
eBay close spoof@ebay.co.uk email address?
October 24, 2008
eBay’s safety center requests users to forward spoof or phishing emails to spoof@ebay.co.uk or spoof@ebay.ie.
There are two reasons for this – firstly eBay will advise you if the email is genuine or if indeed it is a spoof. Secondly eBay have automated scanners which parse the email for web addresses and, if an unknown possible phishing site is found, alert a real live human to check the site out and start working to get it removed from the Internet.
Until the phishing site is taken down, which can take time especially when working with overseas Internet Service providers, eBay can drop the web address into a database so that your Internet browser can flag it as a phishing site (normally by flashing red).
I was somewhat surprised tonight when forwarding a spoof email (to spoof@ebay.co.uk) to receive the following reply – I hope it’s a temporary glitch rather than the service being discontinued:
Hello,
Thank you for your email. You’ve received this automated reply because the method used to contact eBay is no longer in use.
To send us your query, click ‘Contact Us’ on any eBay Help page.
We’re sorry for the delay. We look forward to helping you resolve your query as soon as possible.
Regards,
eBay Customer Support
Strangely, although sending an automated reply, to let me know spoof@ebay.co.uk is no longer in use, the reply still had a KMM reference in the subject line! If you receive the same reply resend any potential spoof email to spoof@ebay.com as that reporting email address still appears to be working.
PayPal glitch unlocks payments on hold
October 18, 2008
A PayPal glitch is allowing users to withdraw funds being held under the 21 day rule. A thread on the UK Payments and Postage board details how a user made a legitimate partial refund and discovered that funds became instantly available with the temporary hold removed. A similar thread on the US discussion boards was pulled by the moderators.
Some sellers have tested refunding as little as 1p and their payments have come off hold as well, allowing them to withdraw the balance to their bank account. The sellers who have reported this state that they have already been left positive feedback and so PayPal should have released the funds anyway. They’re not using it to release funds which are still legitimately on hold according to PayPal’s rules.
For anyone thinking of taking advantage of this we’d highly recommend that you don’t. PayPal can still hold funds or even freeze your account even if you’ve withdrawn the money. If you think the funds should be made available then telephone PayPal and ask them to remove the hold, rather than risk losing your account entirely.
eBay search broken – buyers offered off site ads
October 17, 2008
eBay’s search has been intermittently broken at times during today and totally broken for part of this evening.
A seller contacted me this morning and their items were invisible on eBay UK. Logging into their account they could see items for sale but a search of sellers other items stated they had nothing listed for sale. Even when searching for specific individual items by title they failed to appear in search results.
Some time later the items re-appeared on the site, but they had the newly listed icon next to them – including the item shown above which is a ten day listing with just over 24 hours left to run. A nine day old listing should not be designated as newly listed with the newly listed icon.
This evening things got progressively worse. First came the messages that eBay were unable to run the search entered, although eBay’s off site adverts seemed to function perfectly. Send buyers off eBay while it’s broken and they may never return.
Then the situation deteriated further with searches returning messages simply saying “Sorry, that’s not working right now”. Title and description searches are known to be broken with an estimate of about a week to fix. This evening not even title searches were working, sellers with listings finishing this evening may not have had great success. The problem appears to have affected both the eBay UK and eBay.com sites.
With the busiest time of the year fast approaching buyers, sellers and especially eBay themselves need to have a reliable site. Searches not working is simply not acceptable for an ecommerce site the size of eBay.
Mutual cancellation fee credit glitch resolved
October 15, 2008
We’ve heard from a few sellers recently that they have not been receiving final value fee credits on transactions cancelled by mutual agreement. This is in contradiciton of eBay’s own statement that “if the buyer confirms this mutual agreement, the buyer will not receive an Unpaid Item strike and the seller will receive a Final Value Fee credit.” Pinkie James has now said on the PowerSeller Board that this was a bug, and has been resolved. Anyone who’s filed a mutual cancellation in the last week or so might want to check their seller invoice, and contact eBay for the appropriate refund if it hasn’t been received.
Title & Description search will be broken all week
October 15, 2008
eBay have acknowledged a problem with search, where a title-and-description search is not showing up items which should be visible, though the same listings *do* show in a title-only search. The problem was first reported on seller forums both in the UK and the US earlier in the week: customer support had told several sellers that there was no known problem, but the eBay.com Announcements Board has now said:
Title and Description Search is not displaying all items correctly. Please be assured that we are working aggressively to resolve the issue, and expect it to be fixed by the end of next week. We know how frustrating this is, and sincerely apologize that the fix will take so long, but the reindexing necessary to complete the fix literally takes several days to run.
If you are a seller and your item is not displaying in a Title and Description Search, please don’t hesitate to contact Customer Support, and they will be happy to refund your fees upon validation that your item is impacted by this bug.
If you are a buyer, these items are always available by using Title-only Search (simply uncheck the Include title and description box when running a search). Additionally, if you have Favorite Searches set up, you may want to temporarily modify them to search by Title only.
I would respectfully suggest to eBay Support that they have no idea how frustrating this is; their income, after all, isn’t relying on this function working correctly. Moreover, not everyone reads the AB board – particularly buyers for whom it normally holds little of interest – so they will have no idea why their searches are suddenly not working.
There’s been no corresponding announcement for UK sellers yet, but with an official post to point to now, sellers with missing listings should probably contact customer support with details of the affected items.
Updated to add: also on eBay France.
eBay UK defaults to old search – 30 day BINs vanish
October 6, 2008
Many users on eBay UK appear to have been defaulted to the old search experience. Instead of displaying Best Match with only auctions sorted ending soonest, fixed price listings are also displayed in the pre-Sept 25th sort order.
What’s worse is that sellers who have made use of the new 30 day listing format get zero visibility in core search results. 30 day BINs act as SIF listings in the old search and for many sellers this means they now have very few, or even zero, listings appearing on the core site.
It’s possible to opt back into the new search experience, but the big question is how many buyers will? Threads are starting to appear on discussion boards including Q&A and the PowerSeller board suggesting large numbers of users have been switched back to the old search experience.
If eBay are running tests with small numbers of users still showing the old search experience that’s one thing. If vast numbers of users have been switched back it has serious repercussions for sellers who have switched to 30 day listings as buyers simply won’t see their products.
I’m hoping that eBay move most users back to the new search experience in the very near future. In the meantime sellers who have worked to get to the top of Best Match with Recent Sales are reaping no rewards, but are actually being disadvantaged against sellers who blindly re-listed 10 day BINs.
Recent Comments
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