w~~_7.JPG "pjcdn2005"){kind=avatar}
Hello Canadian eBayers,
Welcome to our weekly chat. Please start posting at your convenience, we will be with you at 1 PM Eastern.
Hello Maureen,
@mjwl2006 wrote:
1. Calculated postage to New Zealand via Canada Post still shows 'shipping not specified' on my listings. Is there any news as to the reason? The method of delivery is perfectly appropriate, but the cost will not compute.
We are still looking into this. I will send you an email when we figure it out.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
2. Product Identifiers are now required for the categories in which I list yet all the UPCs that I added to my items as Custom Item Specifics (as per your advice) in preparation for this day have not transferred. I still have to go through each and every listing as I relist it and manually add the UPC to the listing. For the second time. I'm a bit frustrated by this. Will it be fixed?
I never heard back from you after we briefly discussed this back on May 27. I assumed my suggestions worked out, or that you had been able to add the UPC codes via the bulk edit tool. As I had mentioned then, I don't have much data to figure this out. Can you please send me an email with a few examples that didn't work? I would need item numbers and corresponding UPC codes so I can try it for myself. Also, when you attempted to add the UPC codes, what happened exactly? Did you get any error message? Did the tool look & act like the codes went through? Thanks for any details you can provide.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
3. A blocked ebayer (who was never a buyer) has managed to send me yet another message (May 29) in which he rambled and said odd things (some obscene I gather although I do not speak Quebecois) and I must wonder again how it is possible that a buyer who is blocked (and dutifully reported for harassment at least six times in the past) is still able to circumvent that and send me messages through ebay? I am truly puzzled. And a little concerned for this person's well-being. He does not sound altogether healthy.
Usually we're pretty god at figuring out which accounts belong to the same user, but unless one of the accounts is suspended, the others don't get suspended in turn. When you send me your email, can you include the details of this case, which six user IDs that person used to harass you and the dates it happened, I'll forward the case to the appropriate CS group.
"Usually we're pretty god"
We all know eBay thinks they are God! 
@pjcdn2005 wrote:
Hi Raphael,
I suppose these are more comments rather than questions that you can really answer but perhaps you can pass along the comments. I hear about many of these complaints from Canadians but also from other countries. I wonder how many buyers get frustrated with these things and then leave ebay all together which in turn affects all of us here.
1 - Some gsp transactions from Canadians work out exactly as they should but there have been a multitude of comments from Canadian buyers about the lack of tracking for gsp once it reaches the Kentucky gsp center. The listings states 'international tracking' yet in many cases, it is non existent or doesn't show up until the item itself has been delivered. As you aware, many Canadians dislike the program as it is but at the very least, it should deliver on what it promises.
2 - I'm not sure if most of the tracking problems with the gsp are when Can Par is involved but it does seem that there have been quite a few reports of packages being marked as delivered by Can Par yet the buyer says the package hasn't been delivered. I rarely read about this happening with non gsp transactions delivered by Canada Post yet it seems to happen with Can Par. Perhaps PB should be using just Canada Post??
3 - The claim process with gsp is not streamlined at all and often neither the seller or buyer has a clue what to do when there is a problem. When they do file a claim, the system does not always seem to recognize that it is a gsp claim and the buyer will end up having to phone in order to recover their fees from PB. The system should automatically recognize a gsp claim and let the customer know how to proceed but it doesn't seem to do either of those things.
4 - because ebay often opts sellers into gsp and the seller isn't aware of it, there are often cases of a seller sending the item directly to the buyer. If the buyer is charged taxes/duty at the border, or even if they are not, they shouldn't have had to pay PB those amounts but there is really no process that allows them to easily get those amounts back. Again...they have to phone and often if they reach an overseas cs rep, the reps has no idea what to do.
I have no idea what a gsp sees when they have an overseas transaction but it has to be made clearer on how they should handle it and that it is a gsp transaction. They should also make it more clear on how to handle gsp problems. When a customer complains about a package damaged in transit, many gsp sellers simply say that it isn't their responsibility and have no idea (and/or no inclination) to help the buyer.
On the boards we tend to hear about the bad transactions, not the good ones but there are so so many bad gsp transactions. Perhaps the percentage is low compared to overall transactions but for each bad one, you could be losing one buyer as well as the one or two or more friends that they tell about it. Sellers are sanctioned if they have more than a few bad transactions but the gsp system continues to go on with little improvement.
Hello pjcdn2005,
Thanks for all of these. I will pass them on to the GSP team.
@ottokitty wrote:
I had a return request opened on June 2.
No problem, I replied to the buyer to return the item.
A few days later, the buyer emailed me that he decided to keep the item.
The return request is still open, more than 2 weeks later.
Not really sure what to do (my first of these in quite a while)
Do I have to take some action to close it, or does it happen automatically
Hi ottokitty,
Usually the buyer should close their return request if they decided to keep the item after all. If they didn't, you can contact CS to explain what the buyer said, they should be able to see the email and close the request.
Hi rose-dee,
@rose-dee wrote:
1) Do you know what's going on with the "now you see it, now you don't" sign-in page? A few weeks ago we suddenly had a new style of sign-in page, then it reverted to the old one that's been around for years, then earlier this week the new one appeared again. Now this morning I had the "old" familiar sign-in page greet me. Although it was a bit disconcerting the first time the switch happened (I thought maybe I had entered some hacker's realm), I've come to accept the morphing back and forth now.
However, my real concern is that relatively new eBay buyers may be nervous about signing in when confronted with different pages every few days, and longtime buyers may -- like me -- think they've been misdirected to a nefarious site. Can you blame them? I think this is very poor on the part of eBay. This is the very first portal any user will see -- either announce that there is going to be a change and stick with it, or wait until it's really ready to be rolled out permanently.
Not sure what's going on there. I've alerted the sign-in team and will update this post when I hear back. Regarding the perceived risk of a phishing site, I canM't speak for the whole member base obviously but I wouldn't be too worried about this driving people away. Usually the best way to make sure you end up on the right site is to type the URL in the address bar yourself, or use a bookmark to get to the site you are trying to reach. This alone should ensure you get to the right place. If you access any website via a link that was sent to you, that's when things get risky. Also, in case of doubt, just check the URL to make sure it is "www.ebay.ca".
@rose-dee wrote:
2) My second question (the usual) -- please tell us if anybody has even mentioned the .com cart disconnect issue to eBay HQ lately. I fear my U.S. buyers may have given up on trying to purchase more than one item at a time from me. I don't blame them -- it's easier for them to stick to home ground where everything works for them.
The appropriate teams at eBay HQ are well aware of the issue with the shopping cart, all the way up to Executive level. This doesn't mean that if we don't have it mentioned in a conversation for a week, it gets forgotten. It also doesn't mean that by continuously bringing it up, we will make things move faster. The situation remains the same: the problem is acknowledged, but no resources are available to be assigned to it just yet.
@rose-dee wrote:
3) A related question: how much do you think eBay HQ cares about what happens to its Canadian sellers?
Caring for Canadian sellers and having resources available to resolve a problem that only impacts them are 2 different things that are not necessarily connected. As we do, they care a great deal about Canadian sellers as well as buyers.
@pjcdn2005 wrote:
Regarding UPC codes - The U.S. reps said a week or so ago that when a seller used 'sell similar' the UPC codes would disappear to prevent the wrong one from being associated with a new item. So that means that each time a sellers uses sell similar for the same item, they have to pull out the item again to check on the UPC code. That's a bit odd considering that nothing else disappears with sell similar. So when a seller with thousands of listings wants to use sell similar because a promo doesn't include relists, they have to reenter each UPC code. Or a seller might not even notice that the code has disappeared which could cause them problems in the future.
Is it going to continue to stay that way?
As far as I know, there are no plans for a redesign of how Sell Similar works. I will bring this to the RPI team and see what they say about it.
rose-dee wrote:Thanks Raphael. I'm not really concerned about myself (I'm so used to sudden changes on eBay), but I'm not sure how you can believe seeing a strange sign-in page wouldn't scare a lot of people away.
The part of your post where I thought you might be concerned that you had ended up on a hacker's site was when you said:
@rose-dee wrote:
Although it was a bit disconcerting the first time the switch happened (I thought maybe I had entered some hacker's realm)
As for scaring people away, our traffic numbers (which I can't share) tend to suggest that the new sign in page design bore little to no impact on site attendance.
@rose-dee wrote:
I use a permanent bookmark to eBay.ca on my Google browser, which hasn't changed in months, so I don't understand how the method of access would have anything to do with the different sign-in screen versions. The URL was www.ebay.ca in every case.
What I said was, the best way to ensure that you end up on the real eBay site and not some fake, phishing site is to manually type the URL or to use a bookmark that you created. Of course it has nothing to do with seeing this or that version of the sign-in page. That's the part that we control. 🙂
