eBay

tyler@ebay · ‎07-04-2017

Howdy everyone,

Opening up the thread for our Weekly Chat Session for July 5, 2017. This thread will be open until tomorrow, so please post any questions or subjects for which you would like eBay support.

Many of you have requested an ongoing list of open and resolved items, so we will try to keep a running list going when we open these weekly chats. Here is the current version - more detailed responses can be found in a previous chat thread. See you then!

Open issues:

Browse pages and Search pages showing different results for same category
Some Search pages show watchers, some don't
Items missing from combined invoice - we need more details to investigate. Can the original reporter please let us know the status
Search results page shows shipping costs inconsistent with what's on the item pages - We are working with the Shipping team to figure out the issue and a solution.
Shipping Calculator returning erroneous rates
Selling limits live items count discrepancy - We are investigating further.
Missing Tracked Packet destinations - still no update from PayPal and Pitney Bowes
Adding Economy International Shipping - requested here
Handling times not being added properly - requested here
Link to Community located on Feedback page points to eBay.com - appears to have been resolved, please tag us if this is still a problem you're encountering

Tyler,

Anonymous · ‎07-05-2017

@pocomocomputing wrote:

tyler@ebay wrote:

Howdy everyone,

Opening up the thread for our Weekly Chat Session for July 5, 2017. This thread will be open until tomorrow, so please post any questions or subjects for which you would like eBay support.

Many of you have requested an ongoing list of open and resolved items, so we will try to keep a running list going when we open these weekly chats. Here is the current version - more detailed responses can be found in a previous chat thread. See you then!

Open issues:

Browse pages and Search pages showing different results for same category

Some Search pages show watchers, some don't

Items missing from combined invoice - we need more details to investigate. Can the original reporter please let us know the status

Search results page shows shipping costs inconsistent with what's on the item pages - We are working with the Shipping team to figure out the issue and a solution.

Shipping Calculator returning erroneous rates

Selling limits live items count discrepancy - We are investigating further.

Missing Tracked Packet destinations - still no update from PayPal and Pitney Bowes

Adding Economy International Shipping - requested here

Handling times not being added properly - requested here

Link to Community located on Feedback page points to eBay.com - appears to have been resolved, please tag us if this is still a problem you're encountering

Some of the above issues have the same status since they were added. How do sellers know they are still being looked at? How about a date last checked with each issue.

For example, my issue (in italics above) reported over a year ago and added to your list a few weeks ago, what is happening with it?

That's a good idea. We will do that going forward.

rose-dee · ‎07-05-2017

Further to my Post #14 above, here's another issue to add to the Shippo problem list -- labels not scanning properly at Canada Post offices or through the online tracking.

I would urge eBay Canada reps to read through this thread, as it could result in serious problems for sellers using tracked services and expecting to avoid late shipment defects. No scanned tracking = no proof. Dropping parcels in the box (as suggested in the Announcement page posted by 'mjwl' ) is no answer, as that won't guarantee that an input/acceptance scan can be processed once the parcel is finally handled.

http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/Made-label-on-Shippo-Canada-post-wants-alternative-paymen...

a.depour · ‎07-05-2017

Hi mjwl2006,

I can confirm that this is a known issue, and we have identified the cause. It looks like when a guest user clicks on the link from their purchase confirmation email, they are directed to a US GXO sign in page instead of the CA one; and cannot enter their details.

This will be fixed soon.

@mjwl2006 wrote:

This is not a problem I am experiencing but one I grow weary of not being able to help solve for people who come to eBay Canada Community looking for answers.

The Guest Order system leaves much to be desired.

It seems like people who have an account and forget their password (or never had an account at all) place their orders and are not ever able to log back in to look at it. For a myriad of reasons.

I get that offering a Guest Order process is important but there has to be some examination of the process from the buyer's end. People are getting turned off ebay big time by it. Or the Help Process is lacking severely. Or both.

Please search 'Guest Order' here for a hundred results. There are an average of three questions a week posed about it. And they're virtually all the same. 'I placed a Guest Order and it didn't come and now I cannot log in to look at it and I get some kind of error and please help.'

tyler@ebay · ‎07-05-2017

@bunbar wrote:

A 2 Part Question: Part 1

I sent a buyer (in Mexico) an email telling them that I was able to ship their item cheaper than I thought and that they would receive some of their shipping back. I received an email minutes later asking for a tracking number. I tried to explain that shipping an envelope (Large envelope with sheet music in it) from Canada has no shipping number. They instantly called me a liar and wanted their money back. (Package had just een mailed) I told them to return the music sheet and I would return the payment I even sent a link to the Canada post office that explained this. Each time I answered their email (in English and Spanish) I was called a liar. I was then given negative feedback in which I was also called a liar. At what point does ebay ever take the side of the buyer.

That's a frustrating situation @bunbar, particularly when you were trying to do something nice for a buyer. If your question is about administrative removal of feedback that's not something I can address in the weekly chat, but happy to take it offline if you'll provide me the item number in a private message!

Tyler,

thestuffofchris · ‎07-05-2017

In regards to the issue "Link to Community located on Feedback page points to eBay.com":

The Discussion Boards link leads to the right place, but the Community Values link leads to a "This page may have moved or is no longer available." page.

a.depour · ‎07-05-2017

Hi silverpinups,

Please login on eBay.ca with your buyer ID, and then go to this link and enrol into the Bucks program.

@silverpinups wrote:

Hi Tyler,

I would like to have my eBay Bucks invitation transferred to my buying I.D. Is this possible??

Thanks,

Derrick

Anonymous · ‎07-05-2017

@bunbar wrote:

Part 2:

We must now use Shippo to ship from Canada. Before this when we used to make a label it automatically sent the buyer an email with the tracking number and marked the item as shipped, also with the tracking number. Shippo is not doing any of this. No tracking number. No marking the item as shipped. No emails. I don’t even know how it was paid for. Nothing missing from my bank account or paypal. It did print the label but no confirmation except what you see in the picture

Thanks Bunbar.

We've heard a lot of feedback that sellers would prefer to be charged right away for the label, so Shippo is working on that. Tracking should be uploading automatically so disconcerting to hear that didn't happen. I'll dig into that with Shippo. The buyer email and mark as shipped are functions of the tracking upload, so we'll need to figure out what's going on there.

If you could send me some details on the order directly, that may help too.

Sorry for your experience but thanks for reporting it here.

a.depour · ‎07-05-2017

Just because a seller ships worldwide, doesn't mean they ship to every country. There could be exclusions, like Canada. On which site are you seeing this message? Send me some examples and I'll look into it.

@dutchman48 wrote:

When are they going to get a cart that works? I am tired of this when a seller ships worldwide:

This item does not ship to your location. Here is what you can do:

To see if the seller will ship to you, contact the seller.

Go to checkout and change address.

:

tyler@ebay · ‎07-05-2017

@musicyouneed wrote:

Hi tyler: you indicated below:

Some Search pages show watchers, some don't.

It is not some search pages show watchers, it is some items show watchers some don't. For instance:

Thank you for this clarification @musicyouneed - this helps, because I have an answer for that. This is a change in the way search is displayed, to indicate 'item hotness'. It's intent is to increase sales from the search page, and for items that meet the right popularity measures, it will automatically display. This includes displaying:

Number of watchers

Calling out "Deals"

Prominently displaying "Free Shipping"

Displaying popularity and urgency signals

Prominently showing call to action buttons for bidding or Buy it Now.

Factors considered when ranking an item's popularity include:

Views

Purchases

Watches

Questions asked.

This is looking specifically at a listing's popularity, not a seller's or a seller's performance. So at this point that is working as intended. Thank you again for this clarification, I'll get the point removed from the weekly roundup!

Tyler,

rose-dee · ‎07-05-2017

I'm pleased to hear eBay is looking into this, but 'bunbar' isn't the only one experiencing this problem.

Please take a look at the many reports of problems regarding Shippo this week on the "Seller Central" discussion board for more -- you may want to ask some of those sellers to send you details as well.

tyler@ebay · ‎07-05-2017

Thanks for these! I'll get something filed and see what I can find out for you, and keep you updated via the weekly chat or PM.

Tyler,

Anonymous · ‎07-05-2017

@mjwl2006 wrote:
I must echo it is a step backwards into the Dark Ages that we have to manually upload tracking to eBay AND PayPal now with Shippo labels. Did no one trial this?

Thanks mjwl2006.

The Internet was terrible during the dark ages! 😉

Yes, we did try it. And we invited a few thousands friends to try it out as well.

Tracking not uploading is a bug. We will work on that with Shippo.

Are you uploading to PayPal just to generate an email to the buyer?

There is actually a feature within Shippo that can do that. It's not automated but we could certainly ask Shippo to automate it.

For now, if you click on the actions pull down menu on the right of the Print Label button, you'll see an option to "send notification email".

Anonymous · ‎07-05-2017

@dutchman48 wrote:

Or this issue when you try to add to cart. No wonder buyers are PO'd, going away, and sellers are losing sales.

The seller does not offer combined shipping discounts.The seller has disallowed combined payments and shipping discounts. Please proceed to checkout to complete your purchase.

You go to checkout and get the previous problem.

This is getting ridiculous, Ebay loves to collect their fees but this needs to be fixed.

Maybe just one reason buyers and sellers go off site. So a buyer can buy and a seller can sell. With Ebay you can't do either a lot of the time.

Hi dutchman48.

It sounds like the situation when a seller checks a box to say "will ship worldwide" but fails to add any shipping services for buyers to use to checkout. ebay checkout can't support the checkout process when the necessary information is incomplete.

Once upon a time, this use case was addressed by a flow that allows the buyer to request a total from the seller, and I thought it worked well, albeit a little clunky vs. being able to just checkout like you'd want to as a buyer. I've been suggesting that this flow be restored for quite some time now. It's not scheduled to be addressed in the near term, but we'll keep asking.

Anonymous · ‎07-05-2017

@rose-dee wrote:

A lot of problems are cropping up with Shippo. Many sellers are already abandoning it for Canada Post's Snap Ship (me included). I won't try again until I know most of these issues have been addressed.

Please take a look at the sheer number of subject lines regarding "Shippo" on the Seller Central board. This service is no match for what we had with Paypal, even considering Paypal's recognized flaws.

I'll try to summarize a few issues I've seen reported:

No automated communication with the eBay transaction, i.e. item is not marked "shipped", no tracking # uploaded to eBay, no customer-specific packing slip (that I could find). This is a huge time-waster, and it leaves sellers open to inadvertent omissions or mistakes that could cost them dearly in seller evaluations.

No immediate billing for labels. This is a big deal for a lot of us. The idea of once-in-a-while billing is not only very confusing, but adds extra accounting work for sellers (wasting more time).

Confusing $USD and $CDN label charges.

Problems with weight inputs (customs vs. parcel) not being able to be entered properly.

No Light Packet service (a lot of us use it!). I realize there is a temporary discount on Small Packet at the moment that makes it attractive as an alternative, but that won't last.

Some apparently erroneous overcharges or -- at best -- confusing and unexplained charges when they do appear on Paypal.

If I've forgotten a few, I'd be glad to have other sellers fill in the blanks.

The eBay Canada people said we were going to love this new shipping service. Why was it not tested thoroughly on specifically Canadian scenarios to identify and eliminate these problems before launch?

Thanks rose-dee. I've been monitoring the community for shippo-related conversations. We're aware of the issues and in a few cases I have answered on the threads themselves. There is also a lot of great member to member advice happening as always, and we are grateful for that.

Note that the light packet service is gone. It's not a defect, Canada Post simply isn't offering it on our platform anymore. We've offset that with a rate program that takes is through this year. We can't guarantee anything past that point because CPC typically adjusts rates every January.

tyler@ebay · ‎07-05-2017

@dutchman48 wrote:

I made a purchase this morning and nothing in regards to Ebay bucks.

It is supposed to start today, so will I get them?

Hi @dutchman48 - make sure that you've enrolled!

If you've already enrolled in eBay Bucks for Canada, then make sure the purchase met the requirements. If you were enrolled and it did meet the requirements, but you don't see the bucks in your balance feel free to shoot me a PM and I'll take a look at it.

Tyler,

tyler@ebay · ‎07-05-2017

@rose-dee wrote:

Last post here for today (sorry, I've been saving them up) ---

This is more in the way of a suggestion. For years (on .ca) in the SYI shipping section, I've had to choose "Worldwide" as a second international shipping destination in order to have New Zealand show up with a specific shipping cost in a listing. However, the effect of this is to create a double entry for shipping to the U.S. on the Shipping section tab of the listing, which could be confusing for some buyers.

Would it be possible to add "Oceania" or even "New Zealand" itself to the specific international destination list?

For years, Australia has been on that list, along with some European and other countries. Including "Oceania" in the list would capture NZ, and presumably a seller's own exclusion list would ensure that more obscure destinations would not be included. For me (and I'm sure for many other Canadian sellers), NZ is a significant buyer market that I'd like to be able to cater to in displaying shipping costs.

Can this be done??

@rose-dee I'm not certain if this is something that can be done quickly, but it seems a very reasonable suggestion. I'll get one written up and message you directly if I need more details!

Tyler,

tyler@ebay · ‎07-05-2017

@thestuffofchris wrote:
In regards to the issue "Link to Community located on Feedback page points to eBay.com":

The Discussion Boards link leads to the right place, but the Community Values link leads to a "This page may have moved or is no longer available." page.

Thanks for this! I'll get it reported and hopefully get it resolved quickly. 🙂

Tyler,

Anonymous · ‎07-05-2017

@rose-dee wrote:

@dutchman48 wrote:

Or this issue when you try to add to cart. No wonder buyers are PO'd, going away, and sellers are losing sales.

The seller does not offer combined shipping discounts.The seller has disallowed combined payments and shipping discounts. Please proceed to checkout to complete your purchase.

You go to checkout and get the previous problem.

I expect eBay will say that all a seller has to do to avoid having buyers see the "no combined discounts" error message is to toggle the "offer combined discounts" option on within Seller Preferences. That's true, but the reason this issue remains a problem is because eBay doesn't see it as anything they need to fix. What they really need to do is either:

1) Make sellers aware of what they have to do to avoid it, via a general-distribution email explaining the issue in detail, preferably with visual examples on what steps and options lead to which results.

Incidentally, a few months ago there was an odd banner message/warning that ran for a while on the top of .com SYI pages that referred to combined discounts. It was so perplexing and incoherent that I couldn't make any sense of it at the time. Now, in retrospect, I think it was a warning to sellers to turn on "offer combined discounts" (and possibly also to use automated rules only) -- but this needs to be stated far more clearly and understandably for the average seller to grasp what needs to be done.

OR:

2) Change the system so that not toggling the discounts to "on" does not generate the error screen that is so confusing and frustrating to buyers.

It seems that by introducing the option to turn on combined discounts or not, eBay has somehow knocked out the part of its checkout system that used to allow buyers to ask for a manually-adjusted total from within the cart (using "Request Total").

I can say that I've had the same inability to request a total from a cart as a buyer several times over the past few months, and based on the explanations I've been given by the eBay staffers, I now know why -- my sellers probably had no idea whatsoever that they had to toggle the combined discount option on. Whether having that option turned on avoids the "seller does not offer discounts" error screen even if a seller hasn't set up any automated discounts/rules, I really don't know. Perhaps one of the eBay people could test and confirm this.

This is such an critical function (in fact you could argue it's the most critical function of an online selling platform) that it's beyond belief why it hasn't been fully resolved before now. Surely eBay doesn't want to lose all the FVFs generated by those multi-item orders, or worse -- lose confused and frustrated buyers from the site entirely.

Thanks for the suggestion. I know these issues are very frustrating for you. We do take things seriously. It is important to point out that these are not dominant use cases at all. The overwhelming majority of the millions of items bought every day are single item purchases, and almost all of our combined item checkouts each day are successful as well.

We'd love to have more multi-order purchases but we don't. There are some sellers whose business model lends itself to combined discounts, and we've got tools for them that actually work well, though they are tricky to find and sometimes tricky to use for sure. I think we can better at that, but this is not an area of focus for 2017. Again, not that it isn't important, but resource trade-offs always need to be made, no matter how many developers we hire.

We've also got use cases that we won't reasonably be able to support more elegantly any time soon - for example, sellers who want to be able to quote back combined actual shipping before purchase with an infinite number of package types and sizes and weights. That type of approach unfortunately doesn't work very well on eBay now with the immediate pay / retail standard experience. Not like it used to, at least.

The best workaround for those type of sellers would be a request total flow - so another reason to try to get that flow back. But even in those cases, I wonder whether some sellers (not necessarily you) might be better to reconsider their strategy - I mean, you can wait for eBay to change to work the way you want it to, or try to make the best of what the platform does offer. For example, sellers with complex combined shipping rules could consider simplifying the rules, moving to flat rate for some or all items, or even offering free shipping and pushing an average ship value into the item price.

That approach won't work for all, I know, but it's a thought.

tyler@ebay · ‎07-05-2017

Thanks for joining us - the chat is now closed.

Join us next Wednesday, see you then!

Tyler,

Anonymous · ‎07-05-2017

@rose-dee wrote:

Further to my Post #14 above, here's another issue to add to the Shippo problem list -- labels not scanning properly at Canada Post offices or through the online tracking.

I would urge eBay Canada reps to read through this thread, as it could result in serious problems for sellers using tracked services and expecting to avoid late shipment defects. No scanned tracking = no proof. Dropping parcels in the box (as suggested in the Announcement page posted by 'mjwl' ) is no answer, as that won't guarantee that an input/acceptance scan can be processed once the parcel is finally handled.

http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/Made-label-on-Shippo-Canada-post-wants-alternative-paymen...

Thanks. A few things to note:

This is a Canada Post issue and not a Shippo issue. The same thing is happening with labels printed on the new PayPal solution.
If you are encountering problems, ask the clerk to contact Canada Post's retail help desk, who can walk the clerk thru the correct procedures.
If you drop a parcel in a letterbox, it will absolutely be inducted. It actually DOES guarantee that it will be accepted, because that's what Canada Post told us will happen, and they are the one tracking the issue. The issue is only with retail clerks who are unfamiliar with the new procedures - not with CPC's own mail sorting and induction systems.