Another bug - eBay refuses to add sales tax to B.C.

[dipmicro]

Just spent bl**dy 20 minutes on this.

eBay was refusing to add sales tax. Either the combine button would not do anything or when editing sales record, it would remove tax.

Finally I changed province from "B.C." to "BC" and it allowed adding tax. However, the edit must be done twice, it will not accept province change and tax during same edit.

This is pretty lame programming on eBay side, they should be using postal code to determine province, buyers can misspell their province names or use the French names (la Colombie-Britannique, C.-B.), etc.

[momoftwingles2]

Hi dipmicro,

Isn't the official abbreviation for British Columbia BC? In the SaskTel phone book that is the way it is listed.

And, when you look up the official abbreviations for the provinces this is what comes up....

These are the official two-letter abbreviations for the provinces and territories in Canada.

Alberta AB
British Columbia BC
Manitoba MB
New Brunswick NB
Newfoundland and Labrador NL
Northwest Territories NT
Nova Scotia NS
Nunavut NU
Ontario ON
Prince Edward Island PE
ed Quebec QC
Saskatchewan SK
Yukon YT

Hope this helps, but I guess you have it fixed.

You are right though....Canadians can initially avoid paying taxes if they do as you mentioned...misspell their province or use the French version of the name.

However, when a customer does this, I e-mail them and let them know that I am refunding their entire payment and will reissue their eBay invoice with the correct tax.

MOST TIMES it's an innocent mistake. But......and we all know those buts!

Have a good one!
Susan
momoftwingles2

[dipmicro]

Thank you Susan. I got it done, but my frustration is with eBay more than with people using loopholes.

We have this glorious hyped platform that moves billions of dollars merchandise and they cannot get basic stuff right. Look at the map here and see how trivial is to determine the province from the first letter of postal code.

Almost daily I run into some issue with eBay, from invoicing, communication (e.g. "This question is invalid" when you press "Reply"), eBay not sending notification emails, Page not Responding, search broken, eBay not working again, etc. They do not care anyway, they have million suckers like myself, one less or more, who cares.

I applaud you with your decision to retire from eBay.

[canadaspatchking]

It doesn't just end at BC. When we were selling on eBay (taking an extended, if not, forever break as this place is going to heck in a hand-basket quickly) we have problems with buyers from Newfoundland, Northwest Territories and Nunavut all having "different" short-forms. The problems meant that we either had to eat the tax (for those with little tax to recoup) or we had to refund the buyer and re-invoice them. Just imagine now if you have to refund for an eBay mistake that it now costs you 30 cents in PayPal fees, maddening and complete unnecessary.

The brilliant minds that run eBay.ca and PayPal both don't seem to know that if you let buyers have a choice as to an abbreviation that not all of them will use the _only_ one that they recognize. Could it have been terribly hard to offer drop-down boxes that sets the province/territory automatically or back-coding any short-forms that are found on their database and "correct" the ones that don't match.

But that would actually require effort, knowledge and fore-thought. Something that eBay has never been good at.