Hello everyone,
Welcome to our weekly session. Today I'll leave the thread open for most of the day and come reply as time permits.
Here are the issues I am currently tracking:
- Full shipping FVF charged on combined orders with discounted shipping (dutchman48)
- Notifications reappearing in the header (pocomocomputing)
- UPC codes suddenly not recognized on live listings (mjwl2006)
And the issues for which I have had news:
- Listings allowed to go live without a photo (rose-dee) - This is a known bug that is being worked on.
- SYI stripping the weight off when switching back to USD on an item that was originally in USD and set up with calculated shipping (block36) - bug has been logged and work should begin soon.
- SYI preventing relist and Sell Similar if the original listing had a non compliant photo (pierrelebel) - problem has been identified and I am engaging with the relevant team to address.
@dutchman48 wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
@dutchman48 wrote:
I also got 2 orders from .ca for notes listed on .com and they are screwed up as well. 1 order never gave discounts and the other picked a number out of the air. I DON'T HAVE THE TIME TO SEND YOU 59 ITEMS TO LOOK AT.This is an absolute mess and needs to be fixed or I am gone in the not to ditant future other than no store and the odd item. I guess Ebay really doesn't care about whaat works or not, as long as they can steal money from both buyers and sellers to pad their income.
dutchman, as I said earlier you can just send me the buyers' IDs. This will take just 5 minutes. Please send me the info like this:
buyer 1 - issue encountered
buyer 2 - issue encountered
buyer 3 - issue encountered
I really can't help you if you don't at least show me where the problem is.
kissguy1963 - 3 orders - only one shipping is correct is the one i invoiced. I have to do refunds on the other 2
odoscotthom - bought 12 tokens and forced to pay each one separately - have to do 11 refunds.
As I have said, This garbage with Ebay is getting ridiculous. They say they want buyers but will screw sellers left right and center to line their pockets. I am also a buyer and if this does not stop or get fixed, they will lose me as a buyer as well
Thanks for providing me with something to look at. I took a look and at first glance I was not able to see what could have gone wrong. Please give me some time to dig deeper in those two particular cases.
For now, I tried adding several of your items to the shopping cart on eBay.com and each seemed to apply the shipping discounts as described on the listing (I used a buyer account with a US shipping address):
- 391257160530 - $3.50 shipping, $0.50 additional eligible items
- 391263616910 - $3.00 shipping, Free for additional eligible items
- 391263659762 - $3.00 shipping, not eligible for additional shipping discounts
- 262051550446 - $3.00 shipping, Free for additional eligible items > this one did put a shipping charge
Looking at your combined shipping discount rules, I see that you made different rules for 2 types of paper money (currency and certified currency). My guess is this may cause confusion in the system, for example I wasn't able to easily figure out which of your items fell into which of the two. My guess is the system only applies a shipping discounts on additional items if there was a previous, full price shipping previously added to the cart. This may explain what happened with my test just now.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
@mjwl2006 wrote:
That's right, it will and that's what I have done when I got desperate enough BUT THE BULK EDIT TOOL ALSO ADDS PRODUCT CATALOGUE DATA and wipes out associated Item Specifics (without warning) to listings that it touches and so far all those details have been seriously incorrect.
And I mean that. Wrong, all wrong.
It took me weeks months and years to get these listings correct. Therefore, the Bulk Editor isn't really an option for sellers in my categories at present. Unfortunately. It's a huge time-waster and morale soul-sucker to keep finding ways to workaround problems that are really fundamental to selling on this platform.
But thanks.
I'm sorry you feel this way Maureen.
I don't get these issues with BEAR at all. Could you give me 2 items of yours so I can try adding a $1 handling fee to them and see for myself if it messes up anything else?
Thanks.
It doesn't happen when one tinkers with the handling fee or associated shipping services using Bulk Editor. It arises when one forgets oneself and tries to use the Bulk Editor to do things like edit. In Bulk. Or relist an item, for example.
Are you looking for me to cite instances when it adds incorrect data from the Product Catalogue or that the data itself is incorrect?
I took this issue to Community when it first arose for me. In July, after I had worked for weeks solidly to gain compliance with the required UPCs. The act of using Bulk Editor wiped data, tried to move my items into clearly incorrect categories, the works.
Here is but one of my posts with examples https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/quot-No-product-found-for-ProductListingDetails-quot/m-p... and there are others, dating back as far as Spring Update when the move to Product Identifiers was announced.
But I suppose that if a seller didn't really care whether or not his or her listings were compliant with Product Identifiers in the first place, this rather huge problem to me wouldn't matter much to them. They might not even notice. Perhaps not enough sellers have complained. I certainly see a high percentage of Does Not Apply now in the UPC field of other seller's listings but that also might be because re-listing that item caused the error that claims a valid UPC is no longer. I have learned to avoid that by utilizing the Automated Relist Once if it Doesn't Sell feature as I mentioned at Board Hour last week but that is growing old fast since it severely limits my ability to actually DO anything with any of my 800+ listings. It's been two 30-day cycles now, after all. I suppose my folly was to do what ebay told me to do in order to be Product Identifier complaint and then to notice it was being undone by a fundamentally flawed Product Catalogue when I went to relist it using the Bulk Editor?
Anyway, please let me know exactly what you want to see. I have at least a dozen examples that I can show you of how this Product Catalogue issue and Bulk Editor problem is not working. But that again is two separate issues. If the data associated with the Product Catalogue was correct, having it overwrite Item Specifics and move things into completely different categories within a seller's listings might be a good thing. As it stands, it certainly is not.
As to my feelings on all of this, thank you for your concern. Again, I stress that I realize you face this firing squad weekly. From my standpoint, I can't say for certain that I'll be here all that much longer. It is because I actually care about things working as we were told they should that I am completely and utterly demoralized at this point. And I am not a person who is readily or easily dissuaded or disillusioned. That I would seriously consider shuttering shop at the single most profitable time of year for a toy seller should speak volumes.
It sounded like you were saying that changing the handling price caused these problems. When I tried, it seemed not to do that.
What you are describing are much bigger issues which I would love to trouble shoot. After reading your post, I don't have a clear step by step description of what you did in BEAR and what happened as a result. When you have time, could you send me an email with the following format, this is how we describe site issues internally and it greatly helps in reproducing the problem, which is a necessary step to resolve anything.
Here is an example of what I need:
1. from My eBay, select all active listings
2. Click the Edit button
3. Items load in BEAR
4. Select all items
5. Select Edit description
6. Make edits to description in bulk
7. Click OK
8. Click Submit, get success confirmation
Expected result: all selected listings' descriptions get appropriately edited
Actual result: All Item Specifics replaced with erroneous data from the eBay catalogue.
You don't have to do this with all your items obviously, but just please capture what you do as exactly as possible so I can try the exact same thing.
Thanks!
@rose-dee wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
In this scenario, the buyer would not be blocked from replying "no" to the question but eBay would ignore it when measuring your OTS metric.
How can we be sure of that Raphael? Unless we are checking our feedback every day and keep track on which day someone left a feedback and then compare it to the estimated delivery date in order details we have no way of knowing when the buyer even said the item was late. Unless we can compare the information for ourselves we have no way of knowing if ebay is really not counting an item as being late in that situation.
I don't have a way to tell you how to verify that for yourself, but it's not different than back when the DSRs were anonymous... How could you tell that your DSR score was correct without knowing who gave you want score, or whether they gave you a score at all?
We won't count a transaction as having arrived late if the buyer responds with a no to the on time shipping question before the date stated in the question.
Raphael, I'm concerned about this too. Your answers seem unclear to me. You seem to be saying two different things in your responses above (my bold typeface).
Given such a scenario as 'amya4295' noted (which is bound to occur now and then), are you saying eBay will count the response as an on-time arrival toward a seller's overall statistics on the delivery metric, or that the response will not be counted at all? I think this is a very important distinction, because as you've pointed out, every item with a response tabulated will add to the total number of items included in a seller's overall calculation.
Removing or absenting one item will reduce the total number of items with a response, thus increasing the statistical chances of even one late arrival seriously affecting a seller's status. (This is especially the case since we will not be judged on the total number of successfully completed transactions, but only on those with a response -- whether yes or no -- to the all-important Question).
In effect, if your first reply is true, then every time a buyer makes a slip or forgets and says "no" when the item is estimated by eBay to have actually arrived on time, not only will the seller not get credit for the on-time delivery, but the transaction won't be included in the overall calculation, thus reducing the seller's chances of avoiding being downgraded. This is tantamount to a double punishment.
Do you see what I mean? Am I making sense? Could you please clarify your earlier responses -- i.e. will such replies by buyers not be counted at all, or be counted as "on-time" for the purposes of the new policy?
When a buyer responds with a "no" before the date by which we are asking them whether the item arrived, we will not count that transaction in the OTS metric for the seller. Hence, yes, that's one less transaction to count in your total transactions for that metric. I understand your concerns but this isn't the same as when a buyer doesn't respond at all. This is a buyer who selected no,m it is then better for you that we don't count it at all rather than recording a transaction as not delivered on time.
rose-dee wrote:
One other related question: Why did eBay not provide a 3rd option to be completely fair to both buyers and sellers when asking "The Question", i.e. "don't know", or "don't recall"? Surely that would be a far more equitable solution for everybody in cases where the buyer really isn't certain. There is, after all, a 50/50 chance the buyer will arbitrarily pick "no" if he/she really can't remember.
Since I wasn't part of the decision process on how the measurement of the On Time Shipping metric would work when there is no tracking, I can't really speak to why there isn't an "I don't know" option. My educated guess is that the purpose of all this was to simplify things down to a yes/no question.
Again, even though I can't share any specific numbers yet, I can say that many of you would be surprised at how we've been observing buyers handle the shipping question when leaving feedback. As I said before, just wait until you see the preview in your seller dashboard, you might just see that things aren't as bad as they may seem at this time.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
Also, will Delivery Attempt count as delivered on time? Is the program able to discern that distinction? It's hardly the fault of the seller if their on-time tracked parcel sits at the postal counter for nine additional business days because the recipient was out-of-town when the initial delivery attempt was made. Signatures are required for items of higher value. That often leads to Card for Pickup scenarios. I would appreciate a specific answer to that question because I haven't seen one yet.
This question only applies to tracked shipments, because untracked would have no such thing as a delivery attempt.
For tracked shipments, remember that if the acceptance scan is recorded within the seller's stated handling time, the shipping is considered to be on time and nothing after that can change that.
If there was no recorded acceptance scan, or of the acceptance scan was recorded after the seller's stated handling time, we then look at whether there was a delivery confirmation scan recorded within the estimated delivery time. Attempted delivery does not count as confirmed delivery.
If there was no delivery confirmation scan or if the actual delivery confirmation scan was recorded after the latest estimated delivery date, we turn to the buyer's response to the question whether they received the item by the latest estimated date.
This concludes our session for this week. Thanks everyone for joining and see you next week.
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