Multiple id's open - eBay switching them automatically

[drucecat]

Please forgive me if this problem has been posted before, but I have not seen it, nor can I search it out.

I'll try to be short, but some background.

For the past year, I have been in the habit of keeping my main selling id ( on .com) open in one tab of Firefox and my buying id (open in .ca) (different than selling) open in another tab.

Never had an issue until about mid-April. I then started to notice that the id's would become the same, either selling or buying. At first I thought I was just getting forgetful, but the more it happened the more I started to take note.

On April 15, I paid something on my buyer PayPal  account and the transaction went through on my seller PayPal account. (Both the buyer id and seller id have different PayPal accounts also).  On April 16th, I purchased an item on my buyer account, and the transaction completed itself on my seller id. And, consequently on the seller PayPal account.

So, on April 17th, I phoned PayPal, as I thought that it was probably a PayPal problem. I spoke with a very nice lady who said she had never heard of this before, but as I had documented this quite well, she would like to connect me with an eBay representative.  So, she transferred, and I spoke with a very knowledgeable eBay rep., who immediately said, yes, for sure I am correct it is happening. In fact it was happening to him, as he also liked to leave his selling id open on one tab and his buying id open on another. I was the first, to his knowledge, that had informed them that this was happening between .com and .ca, but he seemed to think that it made sense that it would.

Apparently, this is an unwanted result of some Search Engine tweaking that eBay has been doing (see my post Search Engine Grief?, May 31st.). As they weren't having much luck fixing this, the only solution he could offer was to have two separate browsers iterations (both can be Firefox or IE)  open and switch between selling and buying by switching browser iterations.

This works and is still working across .ca and .com. But, today I have noticed that this is no longer working across just .ca. So, the point of this is be careful, even if you have 2 separate iterations open on .ca (I haven't tried .com), each with a different identity, as eBay's Search Engine is bound a determined to make them equal. I mean it is going to try to make both of your id's identical for the current session.   This was a problem for me with my April 16th purchase and it may be a large problem for some of you.

It is really time to fix the problems with the Search Engine!

So, have any of you been having similar issues? Do you have a solution?

[pierrelebel]

I have two selling IDs.

For one I keep a MS-Explorer window open, for the other I use Firefox.  Never had a problem.

[pierrelebel]

I should add that I use only ONE PayPal account with several email addresses - for different purposes (you can have up to eight email addresses for the same PayPal account).

[drucecat]

Thanks for the information Pierrelabel.

As much as I don't want to, I think I'll be trying to have both IE and Firefox open, like you suggest.

The separate PayPal id's may be an issue, but it never was before mid-April.

However, I do think it's interesting that eBay (at least .com) is admitting to this problem, as being fairly recent, and as yet not fixed.

[lady.stark]

I always open my buyer account on .com and my seller account on .ca. I never had a problem. However, if I try to relist an item originally listed on .com, I have to sign out of my buying account and then relist. Because if I don't, it is switching to my buyer account and I have the message that I can't list because this is not the original ID. 🙂

That may be what happens to you, but for buying instead. And it is understandable if your purchase was from a US seller. You'll need to sign out of your seller account and then sign in with your buying account.

Or use 2 different browsers as Pierre suggested.

[dipmicro]

It should not and never worked across one site, because browser tabs or even windows share the same session.

I always keep Selling Manager tab open and open new tab for sales record or item to work on, and when done just close the tab and go back to Sales Manager. In PayPal I keep the Account tab or History tab open and open transactions in second tab. This is by design of the browsers, website usually does not know how many you have open unless they track it through some fancy Javascript.

Have two PayPal accounts, one for regular payments one for micropayments and when I sometimes needed to look in one while keeping another open, I would use "Incognito Window" for the other (right-click Open Link in Incognito Window). Multiple incognito windows/tabs still share the session, so you can have two separate browsing sessions on the computer at the same time. Or use different browser like Pierre.

[dipmicro]

Yet another way would be to use browser profiles and start multiple browser windows each with different profile. They should be completely isolated from each other.