eBay

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-03-2017

In short our store has an issue what was uncovered and has remains unresolved since Tuesday march 21 2017

The issue: eBay on its own is creating payment and shipping policies and then reassigning those newly created policies to replace the ones that we have created and had on some listings for months in some cases.

The PayPal policy that has appeared out of thin air goes to an address and PayPal account that do not exist. Buyers payments are entering limbo if they are even able to pay.

The shipping policies have converted all our affected listings from metric back to imperial measurements and dropped all the unique attributes needed for each policy specific to the product it should be applied to. Ie shipping hockey sticks is different than skates.

The further issue is that once repaired - within seconds/minutes or hours these listings will revert back/be changed to another improper policy and discard all the repairs applied.

With an ebay supervisor monitoring a repair to a couple listings and verifying they are fixed properly - those listings were being tracked… within a couple hours reverted back to improper policies. After contacting ebay when noticing the issue reappear they provided confirmation of the issue and notified technical department.

The latest suggestion was just focusing on payment policy for the time being to put all listings back to our default policy and delete the other one so there would be only 1 policy for payment.

This been completed a number of times, 100% of our listings were assigned to the proper payment policy - the one that appeared on its own was deleted… only 1 payment policy existed.

Minutes to Hours later - another payment policy with the same details as the one deleted appears and assigns itself to some of our listings in place of our default policy that was on it after repair.

This issues has been confirmed again by ebay and the technical department still investigating.

The current work around suggested is to just keep fixing them but this does not address that A) we did not make or apply the policies that are currently preventing our listings from being functional or B) for 2 weeks every listing repaired has had problems reappearing within minutes to hours.

There is still no word from eBay on an issues they have confirmed exists but do not know how to address.

We have also confirmed by taking countless steps to prove that our account has not been compromised and I am the only user at the store with access to the account since the problem was identified.

Are there any other sellers experiencing this issue?

Desperately trying to get this resolved so countless hours do not continue to be wasted.

Anonymous · ‎04-05-2017

It sounds as if someone is hacking your account. We never see those problems ever and hope not in the future.

pjcdn2005 · ‎04-05-2017

I don't use business policies but have never heard about anything like this happening. It is very odd that this doesn't seem to be a common problem as usually if it is a programmming problem more users are affected

The only suggestion that I have is to start weeding out out bus policies altogether and set up your shipping and payment info on each listing. I generally use sell similar for new listings so once the payment info is set up properly I don't have to look at it again when I do a new listing. Of course shipping options do vary so that has to be looked at each time

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-06-2017

Good day

Ourselves and eBay have ruled out hacking since various steps such as purchasing a new computer to access eBay, changing the password to an encrypted one and limiting all use to only myself on a computer isolated form any other business use other than accessing eBay.

Once this was done and the problem still keeps occurring.

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-06-2017

Good day pjcdn2005

I have been using the payment policy as the starting point since 100% of our listings should be going to our PayPal account - once 100% are reassigned to the proper account the one that appears from thin air is deleted. Minutes to hours later eBay is creating a new one and then the reassignments begin. i.e. PayPal#4 would be deleted only to have PayPal#5 appear later on and begins absorbing listings.

When repairing payment policies - shipping also has to be adjusted and listings are moved to their appropriate shipping policy - shipping policies that have materialized not by our doing that have 1-3 listings have had those repaired and policies deleted only to experience the same.

We have a number of shipping policies to take into consideration the various sizes and weights of our sports equipment so that the best shipping rates can always be presented.

we also measure everything in metric to best interact with Canada post - everything keeps being changed back to imperial measurements.

regarding the comment setting up 1 listings that is 100% and then proceeding with sell similar and then adjusting the product details for the following product has been a common practice for me.

I know that listings were not being created with the wrong policies since as of January 16 I made sure that all of our listings were in CDN$ vs US$, manually ended and resisted each product vs using the migration tool. CDN$ shipping policies were created for all our listings and all the old shipping policies that were in USD were deleted at that time so we had a clean house to start the year.

One example that has baffled me would be a hockey stick that was listed in December, had sales in January, February and was working just fine. Other variations of that stick were also listed by creating the additional listings with sell similar process. Without me revising anything the payment changed by itself and our flat rate shipping was also dropped. I ultimately had to make a new listings for one of our buyers to complete their purchase and cancel the one that was not working.

Hoping later today when I attempt to repair listings again whatever the eBay technical department has been up over the last 2 days shows some signs of working.

pjcdn2005 · ‎04-06-2017

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of confidence in the tech department especially when the problem is affecting just a small number of users and isn't a widespread problem. They sometimes tend to treat those type of problems as user caused rather than system caused and will say they are working on it but may not see it as a priority. That might not be the case here though.

Regarding your hockey stick listings... I looked at a couple of completed and current listings and they are showing a flat rate of $50 for shipping anywhere in Canada or the US. It is not set up for calculated shipping....Is that how you want it set up?

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-06-2017

Hi pjcdn,

The shipping on the last 3 listings for our sticks is correct being at the 50 flat rate, I held off on resisting other variances to limit the amount of frustration for both myself an buyers that have been caught up in the problem with it.

The 3 active ones that you are seeing though are effected with the payment policy being impacted, currently all 3 will see payment go to limbo if a buyer were to try and complete

hockey skates would have been a better example of a current listing that is impacted by both payment and shipping... we have 12 skates on our skate shipping policy and 33 pairs of senior skates... there 36 junior skates... so total 57 skates need to have shipping fixed... if putting zip code in for a quote you will get an error to contact seller... its due to being back to imperial - the measurement that way are way too big for any shipping service.

At the moment there are 136 listings with the eBay created payment policy.

I am just about to do another round of repairing our payment policy / repair shipping policy as needed and delete the eBay created one(s) - I document all my steps and will see how it plays out this evening.

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-07-2017

Hi pjcdn

Nope this site is still broken and does not appear the technical team was able to do anything to resolve this, I will have to see how tomorrows phone calls go now.

attached are 3 images,

see the first one 916pm - there are 219 listings to our default payment policy after reassigning effected listings

the one that was created by eBay "paypal#5" was deleted

by 938 - PayPal#6 has materialized and taken over 26 listings

by 954 - PayPal#6 has taken over 80 listings

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-07-2017

image 2

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-07-2017

image 3

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-07-2017

image 4

118 listings effected after repair by 10:04pm

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-07-2017

proper image 3

pjcdn2005 · ‎04-07-2017

The paypal address that you said is appearing doesn't exist at all? It is just being made up somehow?

I see the skate listings that are not showing a shipping cost. How do you know that the problem is caused by the numbers changed to imperial.... does it specifically show that on those specific policies or on the listing itself? Is it possible to show a screenshot of how it looks when first created and then after it has been changed?

I wish i knew more about bus policies because I am probably not helping you. But from the amount of time you are spending on correcting this every day it might be worthwhile to take the policies off altogether.

One last thing.. is it possible that clearing your cache would prevent the info from appearing again?

tosports2bk1 · ‎04-07-2017

Hi PJ

yes, the address for PayPal#6 doesn't exist and the policy materialized on its own within 20 min after having all the listings assigned to our default payment policy. You can see in the following images as time passes the PayPal#6 continues to absorb many other listings from our default policy.

I have not been able to get any answer from eBay other than it is a glitch with their site but no advise on how it can be fixed or how long any sort of repair would be.

For the skates that are not showing a shipping cost I know that is two issues - our skate policy is for Canada and USA - shipping skates outside of North America is not an economical cost for buyers over seas when we only ship with services that provide a tracking number and delivery confirmation. The shipping policy that has materialized similar to the payment policy has no geographic parameters which is allowing customers from all countries to proceed with a purchase but get stalled when there is no shipping cost / ability to pay. These transactions are all ultimately being cancelled and adding to a time consuming issue.

the other issue with our metric setting being changed to imperial, all of our listings are made with metric to best interact with the Canada post calculated cost - so a skate box that is 40cmx40cmx15cm with a weight rage 2-3kg - once listings changes to imperial is being recognized as 40"x40"x15" weight 3 or 30lbs.... regardless of weight at 3 or 30lbs - the measurements in inches are too large for any shipping option and even if the measurement were acceptable the cost would be substantial.

Within each of the listings that convert to imperial - in the shipping section of the listings under options - metric can be reselected so existing LxWxH goes back to CM and a weight range can be selected for proper KG range.

the repair will be saved with both the proper payment policy as well as being put on our skate policy with metric settings - minutes to hours later both policies will be different and the measurements/weight will be back to imperial.

eBay has suggested opting out of business policies all together and going to a manual process - this is not an acceptable option and just as time consuming if not more time consuming - the processes were automated to provide consistency, make transactions easier and put the best information available to any buyer that views the listing without needing to make an inquiry.

Until recently there had not been an issue. I do not wish to go back to the old days (2yrs ago) when I had to respond to 10-25 requests daily for shipping costs and not see a single sale come from it or manually need to invoice buyers after a sale to find they aren't happy with the total cost because it wasn't provided up from then they proceed with buy it now.

regarding the cache - in steps taken to disprove prove fraud /account being compromised / our equipment at fault - I am working on a new laptop purchased 7 days ago and problems were present from the first attempt at trying to fix the problems once the laptop was taken our of the box. This computer has remained in an isolated environment to rule out any potential oddities on our end,

I do appreciate the discussion while continuing to search for a solution, thanks for your posts

John