Hello everyone,
Welcome to our weekly session. The thread will remain open all day and I'll come in to respond as time permits.
Here are the issues I'm currently tracking:
- Wrong tax rates applied to PayPal labels
-
Missing Tracked Packet destinations
- Odd missing gallery picture in search results
Updates:
- Estimated Delivery discrepancy between View Item page and Order Details page - Ticket open, investigation continues
- Sold items going into Unsold container - need live examples to be able to troubleshoot
- Hard block on non compliant images only on relist/sell similar - Selling team is on this
- SYI: Form resets IS when switching currencies. - Problem identified, Dev team is working on a fix
- Safari browser SYI exhibiting erratic behaviour when trying to select text in description in Revise - under investigation
- Combined shipping offers not shown to international buyers- under investigation with shipping team
@pjcdn2005 wrote:
There seems to be some confusion about what causes a seller cancellation defect. I'm under the impression that it is strictly for when the seller will not or can not ship an item because they are out of stock or for some other reason and the buyer did not ask for the cancellation. Basically...a defect is given if an item is not shipped and the buyer didn't request a cancellation.
Is that correct?
Hi pjcdn,
You pretty much have it correct. Here is the eBay definition:
Any transaction cancelled through eBay or refunded through PayPal because the seller no longer has the item or chooses not to ship the item will count in the defect rate as a seller-cancelled transaction. Transactions that are cancelled because the buyer no longer wants the item are not counted in the defect rate.
@pjcdn2005 wrote:
Are there other scenarios that would cause a seller to receive a seller cancellation defect?
For example -
1. If the seller refunded and cancelled after a return but there was no record of the return through ebay (so no 'formal' return request)?
2. Same scenario but the seller refunded through Paypal and did not do a cancellation. Would the refund trigger a defect?
3.If there was no tracking in either of these cases so no real 'proof' that the item was shipped...would that make a difference in whether or not a defect was given?
1. That would be a defect
2. That would also be a defect
3. If the seller didn't ship the item and didn't cancel the transaction and didn't refund the buyer's money, it would then be an item not received case, not a seller cancellation.
@liquidcoastdesign wrote:
@Initially directed to Kalvin @ebay.com until i found out Kalvin isnt with ebay anymore. Only adds to the frustration of trying to get hold of anyone there....
I am an eBay member, have been since 1995 in one form or another. I currently own a store on .CA called Liquidcoast Design Inc.
What this is about is that I have been trying to call eBay all day but there are obviously issues with the phones. All I get is unintelligible garble and I have tried man, many times. My question would be why are there no other options for contacting customer support other than that phone #? If there were I would not be bothering you with this email. There does not seem to be a chat line available, its says I can “message” eBay but i see no way of doing this from the message page and there are no emails listed.
The issue is not huge…
“I sold an item last Friday (Feb 19/16) and was shocked to see the payment arrive with no shipping amount included. Further investigation revealed that the customer would have seen a Free Shipping at their end even though it did not show at my end and had NOT been included as an option in the listing. I danced around the issue with several people from Noida (3 to be exact) and was assured that they would fix it by passing me on to specialists in that field and I would be credited for whatever the shipping cost me. I obviously had to honour the free shipping listing as that was what the customer was seeing. So I want to let you know that shipping on the item (252285500061) was $17.22 C and I would appreciate that as a credit from eBay in some shape or form.”
That as I said was fairly minor but then I tried to get in touch with eBay to let them know that the credit was due and I feel totally frustrated at my ability to contact anyone within the organization until I found your email. Sorry bout that.
Can you do anything for me?
Much appreciated
Hi liquidcoastdesign,
Looking at your listing 252285500061, it seems to have been originally setup with free domestic shipping. I just can't see any trace of revisions or tampering on the listing and when I try to relist it it comes up with free shipping already selected. II also had someone in CS take a look and we are unable to see anything wrong with it. Could you provide a bit more details on what CS told you, and for that matter, who are Nodia? Never heard of them before.
Regarding the issues with contacting CS, I know there has been issues with some departments' phone systems lately, that may have been what you ran into. As for the choice of available contact channels, all I can say is back when all we had was live chat and emails, we were getting strong signals from the community that a phone number was what they wanted above all. Now that phones have been the main contact channel for several years, I'm seeing more and more people wanting emails. Can't please everyone I guess 🙂
@mjwl2006 wrote:
Good evening, Raphael.
Is there a nefarious purpose behind Returns appearing in our new Dashboards? I do not find it to be a meaningful metric, since the only two Returns ever initiated by my buyers have been for 'Ordered by Mistake' and 'Found a Better Price' and neither case ended in return or refund so I had to call Customer Service to have them closed.
Nonetheless, Returns sticks out like a sore thumb on my dashboard beneath Defects. Looking the same as the manner in which defects are counted against sellers, it therefore implies I have some kind of issue that needs to be addressed.
I have read the official word from ebay about it and it does very little to alleviate my concern: 'eBay may alert sellers if their overall returns rate is very high within their category. eBay may also provide recommendations to update your selling practices in order to help minimize returns'.
Will the bots eventually to manage this count be intelligent enough to discern between unfulfilled returns requests and actual returns for reasons such as SNAD? As a seller, if I have a pile of buyers open requests like the two examples cited above, that has little to nothing to do with my selling practises and everything to do with their buying practises.
I don't like where I think this is headed. For now, however, I am trying to reserve judgement and await your reply. Thank you.
Hi Maureen,
The returns rate metric is something that many sellers have asked to see actually. I'm surprised you don't find it meaningful, after all returns is lost business until you successfully resell the item. That said, I understand the concern you're expressing, and for what it's worth, I don't know of any plans to make the returns rate affect your seller standards. For now this is mainly to help sellers keep more of the sales they make.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
My next question is about store subscriptions. It is a source of contention to me that, in a month like this one with no 'free' listing promotions, I am left holding the bag on 300 to 400 unsold listings above and beyond the ones included as Buy It Nows with my 500 'free' as part of the Premium store subscriptions.
There is too wide a gap between Premium and 500 BIN for $60 per month, and 2500 for an Anchor at $200.
Ideally, I need between 750 and 1,000 BIN listings. The 'free' auctions in my category are meaningless. I try those when I am truly desperate and nothing ever sells, so it amounts to little more than a make-work project to switch them back and forth and hope to do so without error. And I really don't want to muck around on ebay.com with those free 500. I am 100 per cent ebay.ca and CAD faithful.
I realize the veteran sellers out there will say, 'If you cannot afford to pay 10 cents to list something, you're in the wrong business' but my reality is that I pay for two categories with many of my listings and also 50 cents per item for International Site Visibility. My listings fees (and associated store subscription) already comprise a major portion of my monthly fees.
Can some thought be given to a plateau between Premium and Anchor? What is the actual reason there is none? I have a few theories but I would like to hear the official word on this instead.
Thanks,
Maureen
I don't know the rationale for having the store levels the way they are, it's been this way for a long time, longer than I've been around. I'm afraid I can't provide you with the official word on that.
@musicyouneed wrote:
Hi Raphael;
A couple of things left over.
Any news on when we will get economy shipping on .ca?
From Last Week:
Statutory Holidays
In BC, Feb 8/16 was a Statutory Holiday where postal outlets were closed, Canada Post was working but the postal outlets were closed. In Ontario Feb 15/16 was a Statutory Holiday where postal outlets were also closed.
- How exactly does eBay handle different statutory holidays in their estimating of business days? I am from BC where there was a holiday on Feb 8/16 and a lot of my parcels were going to Ontario or the USA which has a holiday on Feb 15/16. That is 2 business days that are lost for those parcels. How does ebay handle this calculation and does it put those days as non business days?
I asked the shipping team to confirm this before I write down an answer. I'll update here when I know for sure.
Customs
- Every international parcel goes through customs and for the most part may have to go through an x-ray machine. Customs also looks at the declared value and shipping cost to consider it for VAT. How many days does eBay add to the shipping time to allow for customs inspections?
I asked the shipping team to confirm this before I write down an answer. I'll update here when I know for sure.
I do want to thank who ever changed the sell similiar on .ca to reflect the type of currency it was in. I sell on both .com and .ca and it was a pain to remember to change that ever time to US $. So a big THANK YOU to whomever it should go to.
I also like the fact that you keep the chat session open until the following day. I was out all day and evening so it works for me.
Hello musicyouneed,
Stat holidays: I did get an answer. Right now only the national ones are counted as non business days, which means the BC days and Family days are disregarded. This is due to a limitation in the system which the Shipping team is looking at improving.
Customs delays: I am unable to get a clear answer there. I'll keep trying though.
Thanks for the nice words!
@mjwl2006 wrote:
Oh. I noticed last week something funny with calculated shipping for items in the eBay.ca shopping cart. I didn't do a screen capture but, basically, it allowed shipping options not relevant to the buyer's address to display as 'free' and I wonder if this problem above might be related. I assumed at the time that it was a one-time bug. Does anyone want me to try to recreate it?
Yes please, that would be pretty serious.
@rose-dee wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
1) At this time, we are strongly encouraging Canadian sellers to list in Canadian dollars, based on a deep study and which is explained in more details on the page I linked to above, nothing more.
2) rose-dee wrote:
b) Why do you think it is so difficult for eBay Canada to convince Canada Post that it would be in both parties' interests to provide some sort of acceptance scan for Light and Small Packet?
Convincing isn't what's missing. I can't speak for Canada Post but just based on things you already saw in the news, it's easy to see how implementing things that ultimately cost them money with little or no return would be prohibitive for a company that is retiring door to door mail delivery and cutting the associated costs so they can remain in business.
Thank you for your replies to my questions on the earlier post. I have a couple of follow-up queries.
Re #1) above: I understand about eBay's recommendations regarding listing in $Cdn on .ca, but that's actually not what I had asked. I wanted to know whether there are still plans (or a good possibility) that listing in $Cdn on .ca will be mandatory at some point.
Re #2) Honestly I think the simple thing that is missing is more creative liaison between eBay and Canada Post. I see no reason why Canada Post can't make a bit of money on this issue (at least enough to cover costs), while at the same time encouraging more Canadian sellers to use Canada Post, and fewer Canadian sellers getting downgraded by eBay because of non-tracked postal delays. The end result, of course, would be more sales by Canadian sellers, which would (I presume!) also make eBay happy. Clearly a boon for everybody. Accordingly, I have real trouble buying the "too costly for CP" argument. Send a few of us sellers -- maybe we can convince them.
I'm sure I speak for a majority of Canadian sellers who would be happy to pay, let's say $0.25 or $0.50 extra at the P.O. in order to be given an acceptance receipt for Light/Small Packet parcels that would protect them from the on-time Question. I certainly would. CP could even offer a package deal for frequent users of the service and create a steady, reliable little income stream. Instead, we seem to be struck in a "no can do", excuses-are-simpler-than-solutions mindset. Creative thinking people, creative thinking...
Hi rose-dee,
The answer I gave you to #1 is all I can say on the subject for now.
For #2, I want to reiterate that the fact that Canada Post services are what they are is not due to a lack of collaboration between them and eBay. As I stated many times, we meet regularly (we have a call with them just today actually) and discuss many things including suggestions we get from the community (you) just to mention that. While something like implementing additional scans to untracked services might seem simple to you, I assure you, it isn't. But I won't speak any further on Canada Post's behalf as it isn't appropriate for me to do so.
@rose-dee wrote:
Ahem, um, now you've got me on this soapbox about the on-time metrics...
I may have mentioned this before, but can you please give us a reasonable rationale for why eBay can't exempt Canadian sellers from the on-time "Question" if free shipping is provided to a buyer? In other words, why punish a seller for late delivery if the buyer hasn't paid for shipping?
Shipping time and shipping cost are two different things. Buyers have been telling us that they care more about on-time shipments because they can always decide not to buy an item if they don't agree with the cost of shipping, but they can't know in advance if the item will get shipped as fast as the seller said it would.
@rose-dee wrote:
This also relates to what Pierre was asking last week, i.e. why punish a seller if an otherwise completely happy buyer answers "no" to The Question? Why should buyers be presented with The Question in either scenario? If a buyer gives 5 stars across the board and positive FB, why won't eBay make The Question disappear (or blanked out) for that buyer? This seems like such a common sense move that I'm flabbergasted eBay hasn't implemented it. There is reasonable, and then there is draconian.
The new Standards system measures sellers on 2 things: buyer satisfaction (measured by the defect rate) and on-time shipping. Both metrics are independent from one another. It wouldn't give us an accurate picture if we were to make one metric override the other, which is essentially what this would do.
@musicyouneed wrote:
What about since we are sending to the US, is the US holiday taken into consideration?
Yes.
This concludes our session for this week. Thanks for participating, see you next time!
@liquidcoastdesign - Seems you haven't had the chance to reply to my post, if you want to carry on with this conversation please reach me by email at raphael@ebay.com.
