eBay

raphael@ebay.com · ‎04-20-2016

Hello everyone,

A bit of a late start today. Please go ahead and start posting, I'll be around on & off until tomorrow.

Open issues:

Odd missing gallery picture in search results
Errors when uploading more than one tracking number at a time (repeated, erroneous numbers saved)
Sold items going into Unsold container
Selling limits live items count discrepancy

Updates:

Seller marketing emails issues - Selling team asigned someone to this, waiting on news.
Wrong tax rates applied to PayPal labels - I have asked PayPal and Pitney Bowes for an update
Missing Tracked Packet destinations -I have asked PayPal and Pitney Bowes for an update
Combined shipping offers not shown to international buyers - under investigation with shipping team

rainbow71113 · ‎04-20-2016

posting the holidays won't make a difference, you aren't going to edit all your listings to add one handling day for that weekend and then edit them back to the original handling time after the holidays and once something has been purchased it's out of your hands, so the time to "make listing adjustments" is now not later.

femmefan1946 · ‎04-20-2016

And those should be INTERNATIONAL

There is a consistent flurry of posts about late arrivals from China around the Lunar New Year, when a billion Chinese go home to visit their children .

An alphabetical list by country would be helpful.

And that list should be supplied to all call centre employees.

musicyouneed · ‎04-20-2016

I don't see why we should have to add anything. The problem is with ebay estimated dates and they need to fix it.

We shouldn't have to spend hours doing work around ebays problem. Now that they are making ebay.ca and .com a little different, how about adapting the rules to Canadian sellers. Shipping small items with tracking is not cost effective in Canada, so ebay fix it. Don't make your Canadian sellers have to adjust handling times just to not get defects.

I am so frustrated right now with these sessions, to me we get the runaround. Nothing gets fixed.

dutchman48 · ‎04-20-2016

Ain't it the truth.

I am in 100% agreement as my posts show

rose-dee · ‎04-20-2016

Hi Pierre,
As much as this may be irritating to you, I would caution against mixing this issue with anything else that goes on. Yes, we are raising the store fees. Yes, this issue has been persisting for two weeks now. Is it sub optimal? Sure is. Are the two connected? No they aren't. Does this mean anyone is sitting on their hands? It certainly doesn't. All teams are very busy here, especially developers. On top of their actual development work, they have the very unsexy task to prioritize issues against one another, which inevitably means that some get resolved faster than others. Let's not make it sound like they are incompetent just because this is the issue that is taking a bit longer this time around. After all, as annoying as failed marketing email may be, they aren't halting business.
With all due respect, this is a specious argument. EBay is creating its own overload of priorities. It is clearly the author of its own problems. If eBay would simply halt all major policy and rule changes for one year, all those developers' time could be devoted primarily to actually solving existing issues on this site.

Instituting a moratorium on major changes might also give sellers a chance to actually build their businesses instead of forever altering their listings and business models to satisfy eBay's ever-shifting landscape.

Does eBay have any real conception of how much upheaval the trifecta of recent major policy changes is creating for Canadian sellers? Frankly, these make all the combined bugs and errors on this site look insignificant in comparison.

1) First we had the "on-time" delivery concept, which meant a complete re-thinking of Canadian sellers' shipping strategies, listing practices and bottom lines;

2) Next was the retirement of $USD listings on .ca, with its obvious repercussions for Canadian sellers who depend on U.S. sales, obliging us to engage in hand-wringing decision-making based on a wish and a prayer (not, be it noted, on any disclosed data that sellers could evaluate for themselves in order to make an actually informed decision);

3) Last but not least, the announcement that eBay (not real people, but bots no less) would soon be writing our listing summaries for us -- obliging concerned sellers to find ways to revise all their listings to prevent this ludicrous concept from translating into defects or customer complaints.

In short, eBay doesn't just change the rules every year or two -- they perform a volte-face in policy that changes the whole character of the game. It's no wonder I've come to dread every Seller Update.

To extend the analogy, how would you feel if you invested in equipment and effort for months (or years) to play hockey well, showed up one day and were told, whoops, next month we're playing baseball, sorry about the inconvenience.

Do I sound upset? Well, I am. Once again, as every few months, I have to go through a wrenching process of rethinking and revising my entire business plan and the content of my listings -- not in order to avail myself of more options and/or list more items to create a better chance to sell -- but rather to accommodate eBay's peccadilloes primarily to avoid punishment. Something is rotten in the state of eBay.

musicyouneed · ‎04-20-2016

Wow, you said it perfectly!

rose-dee · ‎04-20-2016

raphael@ebay.com wrote:

[...] We have overwhelming proof that US buyers are not bothered by foreign currencies. We can clearly see in our aggregate data that a good price is way more important to buyers than what currency the item they want is listed in. I can say this without the shadow of a doubt. If you're worried about the balance of US buyers vs CA buyers you get on your CAD listings, I would look at other factors. For example, are the shipping services you offer to Canadians more attractive than what you offer to US buyers?

I'm sorry, but without providing access to the data, procedures, and sampling parameters of eBay's "studies" so that sellers can evaluate their applicability and statistical validity to their own situations, this is a hollow argument.

If eBay has "overwhelming proof", what could possibly be the advantage in concealing the details from sellers? Surely the aggregated data is anonymous -- if it isn't, it should have been so that it could be shared with sellers.

I would like to know, for instance, what seller types, sizes, and categories were sampled, over what period of time the data were collected (was the $Cdn high or low as against the $US during the sampling), whether single-item or multi-item sales were tracked, and whether the data were adjusted to account for the effect of the US/Cdn "cart disconnect" (which would provide a skewed advantage to Canadian sellers listing in $Cdn and selling to the U.S. since buyers would not run into the dead-end checkout for multi-item orders that we were all too familiar with).

rose-dee · ‎04-20-2016

raphael@ebay.com wrote:
[1] In fact, and I have stated this many times already,m the overall amount of TRS sellers has gone up significantly since we implemented the new Standards. By your logic, if it were true, we would be losing money. But it's not the case: more TRS sellers drives buyer confidence and that ultimately leads to many more purchases.

[2] It is 100% true that eBay succeeds only if our sellers succeed.

[1] Hmm, odd ... then why is it so many of us smaller sellers who have been around for years and have provided stellar service to customers are reporting we're on the precipice of losing our TRS? (I'm one of them). Perhaps you're referring to all those big sellers who can afford to hide mediocre or even shabby business practices in a large volume (which turns over defects clean-as-a-whistle ever 3 months) and therefore can easily outrun most of us in the Top Rated Seller game.

[2] Hmm, odd ... then why does eBay make it so complicated, time-consuming and difficult for us to just get on with it and focus on growing our businesses rather than growing our policy protection? Every time I turn around the furniture is being re-arranged and I have to re-arrange my whole selling practices to avoid stumbling.

You know, I used to just love selling on eBay. I can't say it's a pleasure anymore. It's frightening, frustrating, and fixing and revising things to accommodate eBay absorbs my time like a vacuum-cleaner that won't turn off.

As I've said on previous occasions, I'd accept all the upheaval with a big smile on my face if sales were brisk and things were booming. Obviously they are for some sellers, and I pretty much know what type they are.

Whatever happened to David Wenig's pronouncements about supporting his smaller, "core" sellers? The three violent changes that have been made in the last 6 months alone are enough to help snuff out the viability of a lot of us smaller Canadian sellers. I can only conclude that eBay HQ really doesn't give a hoot.

rose-dee · ‎04-20-2016

I'm sorry that all I've done here today is rant, but I'm beyond upset with so many things eBay has recently done.

So here are some "real" question, on the subject of the on-time delivery standards, as seen from a buyer's point of view.

1) March 26, 2016 - I purchased some drafting tools I needed, one from the U.K. and three from China (the only place I could find what I particularly wanted). Both sellers provided completely free shipping.

2) April 18th - Both parcels arrived on the same day. This was 14 business days from the U.K. and from China.

3) I left FB for both sellers, but for the U.K. seller, eBay showed an outside delivery date of April 8 (10 business days from purchase), but April 27 -- more than a month -- for the Chinese items. The U.K. seller showed 1 business day handling time, which means eBay only gave him 9 business days from purchase to get the item to Canada, through customs, and delivered to my semi-rural location, which takes a good 2 to 3 days from the Montreal clearing centre, plus 1 to 2 days to clear customs. That's 5 days to start with. And there was also Easter Monday in that time period.

Of course, I was presented with the question for the U.K. seller: "Was the item delivered by April 8th"? Well, now I had a crisis of conscience. This was a relatively small seller. Had I not been a seller, I would have answered "No", and this poor seller, despite selling a wonderful product that I couldn't find elsewhere at the price, dispatching it almost immediately, packing it carefully, and providing free shipping to boot, would have got a black mark.

I lied, and answered "Yes", mainly because I knew that by doing so I'd be at least giving my seller a chance to stack the statistics in his favour. I refused to completely pass over the "Question" for the same reason.

Now, I was angry about all this as a buyer (and as a seller, realizing what goes on in the background). So perhaps you can explain:

(a) How all this can possibly evaluate a smaller seller's performance fairly . My U.K. seller got my item out the door within 1 day using a shipping service I was happy to accept. The rest was out of his hands.

(b) Why eBay can provide a month to a Chinese seller for delivery (when we all know Chinese sellers benefit from state-subsidized priority air shipping), while a U.K. seller -- still an international delivery -- gets 10 business days?

(c) Why eBay would even present the on-time question to buyers when they've been given free shipping? Both sellers got automatic 5-star DSRs from eBay for that. So how does eBay justify this ridiculous contradiction? I know I'm not the first person to have brought up this glaring lacuna of logic.

(d) Why eBay can't (or won't) "blank out" the on-time Question when free shipping is provided, in the same way it was able to blank out the shipping DSR for free shipping.

(e) In the same vein, why eBay can't seem to appreciate that if free shipping released sellers from the burden of the on-time shipping standard, there might be an incentive for more sellers to offer free shipping? Resulting -- innovative idea! -- in better sales. Holy cats, this seems so obvious.

I felt like messaging my lovely U.K. seller and telling him how eBay had conspired to screw him, but what good would it do? I'd simply frighten him. He'd probably pull the item from eBay, charge exorbitant tracked shipping to Canada to cover himself, or decide to stop selling to Canada altogether in order to avoid the risk. Well, there you have the crux of the matter -- from both buyer's and seller's point of view.

How does any of this benefit buyer, seller, or ultimately eBay for that matter? What made eBay great -- and endlessly interesting for international buyers -- was the wide variety of rare and hard-to-find items at good prices. If eBay scares away those sellers from selling internationally because of the on-time delivery standard (and I'm about to become one of them), how does that make it a better marketplace? It's just shake-my-head ridiculous.

Sorry, I'm ranting again...

lucitabby · ‎04-20-2016

We have overwhelming proof that US buyers are not bothered by foreign currencies. We can clearly see in our aggregate data that a good price is way more important to buyers than what currency the item they want is listed in. I can say this without the shadow of a doubt.

I am sure many Canadians would be interested in reading this aggregate data.

rainbow71113 · ‎04-20-2016

you are making my earlier point much more intensely....as I said -we should be able to fight to have our delayed defects removed if the buyer provides glowing positive feedback. Isn't it the buyer, in the end, who keeps us in business. I had the reverse problem, from October to January all my UK packages gave me a defect, I seriously thought about stopping shipments to the UK but I thought, since I don't have that many I'll keep trying and lately they have been getting there much faster but Australia is now giving me trouble. It's always something. You mentioned how we are jumping through hoops to get our listings to comply, I've spent the last 4 weeks updating upc/mpn/brand names only to lose my variation photos in over 200 listings, and I see I have over 1300 listings that have photo size issues that I will have to address when I migrate to Cdn because I haven't had time to rephotograph all those items. I usually list 13 new items a DAY, in the last 4 weeks I've only listed about 30 in the WHOLE time due to all these issues. I have no idea when I'm going to be able to get back to the business of listing when I now have to switch each listing over to Cdn, that's over 7000 listings...well, minus the 1300, but still the migration tool isn't going to automatically relist them, it's going to make us do "sell similar" and we still have to go into EACH listing to make any changes. I used to have goals, have a certain amount listed, etc and now I wonder why I even bother-it's only more work down the road.

ypdc_dennis · ‎04-21-2016

@rainbow71113 wrote:
posting the holidays won't make a difference, ...

A list of business holidays for the year sets the standard to measure eBay against.

A list of holidays allows sellers to point out any problems with the selection of dates for the local eBay. The more eyes on an issue, the better the chances of any problems being fixed BEFORE the holiday arrives.

This is an important issue which should not be left in the hands of computer programmers who doesn't know anything about the eBay country they are setting the options for.

-..-

rainbow71113 · ‎04-21-2016

true but having them know about the holidays doesn't guarantee removing defects because of one day over Easter -from the messages on some of the forums I'm sure there were sellers who addressed this issue. Ebay did remove my defects over Christmas but only because Canada Post put a flag on their website saying that there was a delay in processing mail and to be patient.

raphael@ebay.com · ‎04-21-2016

@rainbow71113 wrote:

good to know- thanks.

can you tell me why ebay encourages linking paypal to ebay "for faster payments/checkouts" from what I can tell these buyers are the ones that can't purchase multiple items without paying right away and I'm constantly getting buyers asking me what to do because they don't want to pay for the shipping for each item. Apparently paypal can unlink them but it takes a few days for the changes to go through. This doesn't seem to be an issue of .ca versus .com, they seem to know before even starting that they will have to pay for each item. I've had one buyer purchase and pay for over 20 items and I had to refund $86 in shipping overages.

Hi rainbow71113,

PayPal isn't related to buyers being unable to purchase more than one item at a time. This is caused by 2 things:

The shopping cart on eBay.com can only accept items that were listed on eBay.com (not a bug, it was built that way)
eBay.com forces buyers into an Immediate Pay flow on most BIN items

Because of the above, any items that were listed on sites other than eBay.com can only be purchased one at a time if the buyer is shopping on eBay.com. This is something that we are well aware of and that has been discussed at length on these weekly sessions. The US Checkout team knows about this issue but we weren't able yet to get resources allocated for the full shopping cart rebuild necessary to make this go away. No one feels great about this, especially here at the Canadian office, but it is what it is. We will continue to advocate for this work to be done until it gets done.

Regarding the linking of your eBay and PayPal accounts, which once again is in no way connected with the problem I have described above. A buyer doesn't need eBay or PayPal's help to link or unlink their accounts. This is easily done right from My eBay:

raphael@ebay.com · ‎04-21-2016

@ypdc_dennis wrote:

Question/Suggestion:

Is this going to be a problem going forward on eBay.ca with holiday issues?

Suggestion: Post an announcement at the start of each year listing what days will be treated as business holidays for eBay that year. This not just an eBay,ca specific problem -- the info should be available for all of the eBay sites.

That way sellers can make listing adjustments as needed.

Hi ypdc_dennis,

Thanks for the suggestion, it will be shared with the Shipping team.

raphael@ebay.com · ‎04-21-2016

Hi rose-dee,

I appreciate that you are frustrated, and I'm sorry that the recently announced changes are making you upset.

@rose-dee wrote:

(a) How all this can possibly evaluate a smaller seller's performance fairly . My U.K. seller got my item out the door within 1 day using a shipping service I was happy to accept. The rest was out of his hands.

(b) Why eBay can provide a month to a Chinese seller for delivery (when we all know Chinese sellers benefit from state-subsidized priority air shipping), while a U.K. seller -- still an international delivery -- gets 10 business days?

(c) Why eBay would even present the on-time question to buyers when they've been given free shipping? Both sellers got automatic 5-star DSRs from eBay for that. So how does eBay justify this ridiculous contradiction? I know I'm not the first person to have brought up this glaring lacuna of logic.

(d) Why eBay can't (or won't) "blank out" the on-time Question when free shipping is provided, in the same way it was able to blank out the shipping DSR for free shipping.

(e) In the same vein, why eBay can't seem to appreciate that if free shipping released sellers from the burden of the on-time shipping standard, there might be an incentive for more sellers to offer free shipping? Resulting -- innovative idea! -- in better sales. Holy cats, this seems so obvious.

I felt like messaging my lovely U.K. seller and telling him how eBay had conspired to screw him, but what good would it do? I'd simply frighten him. He'd probably pull the item from eBay, charge exorbitant tracked shipping to Canada to cover himself, or decide to stop selling to Canada altogether in order to avoid the risk. Well, there you have the crux of the matter -- from both buyer's and seller's point of view.

How does any of this benefit buyer, seller, or ultimately eBay for that matter? What made eBay great -- and endlessly interesting for international buyers -- was the wide variety of rare and hard-to-find items at good prices. If eBay scares away those sellers from selling internationally because of the on-time delivery standard (and I'm about to become one of them), how does that make it a better marketplace? It's just shake-my-head ridiculous.

Sorry, I'm ranting again...

All I can say about this is, as a reminder, the Standards team, along with country-specific employees such as myself, are taking all the comments and suggestions we got (many of them from these weekly sessions I might add) and will be looking to improve how Seller Standards work for cross-border trade specifically. I don't have any details to share about what changes are on the table yet, but please keep your comments and suggestions coming. This goes for everyone.