Well managed promotion...NOT!!

[muscoviteman]

ell managed promotion...NOT!!

I just received an email with the title:

"These savings are SO Canadian, eh?"

One of the items is

eBay item number: 400522260725

Under shipping it says "Does not ship to Canada" !

[dutchman48]

Seller is in US and only sells to the US

[dutchman48]

Can you post the email?

[momcqueen]

That listing does not exist on ebay.ca. 

[momcqueen]

[momcqueen]

Wait, I have been shown the error of my ways. 

and 

You're right, that makes no sense whatsoever.

[momcqueen]

Thanks to an observant Ebay Discussion Board member, I am looking at a copy of an email like this. The last three items on the list do not ship to Canada, they are USA-only. 

[momcqueen]

It has a different headline but the member, while a legacy user, is also a resident of Canada:

http://mail.ebay.com/r/mail/fc96bII98356eII1b4edf2aaffII2

As I mentioned previously, the last three items on the list never shipped to Canada.

A few are already sold-out.

[momcqueen]

As a side question, does anyone (aside from me) use the thumbs-up vs thumbs-down link at the bottom of emails like these to say whether 'I've found them useful?' Maybe that is the best way to bring to the attention of the folks who curate these deals that the deals don't always apply to the receiver. 

[rose-dee]

---

@mjwl2006 wrote:

As a side question, does anyone (aside from me) use the thumbs-up vs thumbs-down link at the bottom of emails like these to say whether 'I've found them useful?' Maybe that is the best way to bring to the attention of the folks who curate these deals that the deals don't always apply to the receiver. 

---

It's the "Your opinion matters" part I can't get past without a sneer and a guffaw.  Which is why I rarely bother.  

What does "helpful" mean anyway in this context?  The "survey" itself is poorly conceived.  I choose thumbs-up, yes, this email was helpful in pointing out how badly designed and managed eBay's promotions can be.  OK, we'll keep sending out confusing emails.  Or I choose thumbs-down, this email was not helpful.  OK, we won't send out announcement emails like this anymore.  These guys need to go back to the drawing board. 

If they actually allowed a comment, or a few specific and pertinent yes/no questions, and actually communicated back to users in general on the results now and then, I might be more inclined to respond.  

[momcqueen]

But they do?! At least, when I have used that feature to respond, there was a series of questions and a field for adding comments.

Unless they are not all the same. 

[momcqueen]

I had to look through my inbox until I could find an email with the option to respond on the bottom. It was one from ebay.com incidentally. This is what it took me to when I clicked it. 

[dutchman48]

Because he is in the US and only sells to the US

[dutchman48]

Any chance to give Ebay a thumbs down or bad rap and it is due to their stupidity, they get it is as much as possible and well deserved if I may say so

[widgetc]

I received that email this morning. It was an email to my email address. It did not appear in my messages on eBay. In spite of the "Canadian" headline there were U.S . sellers who do not ship to Canada and/or are sold out.

Thumbs down!

[momcqueen]

I think when that kind of thing happens, the only way it will get through to the folks generating the email (since we know they won't be reading about it here) is to thumbs-down the message and state that as the reason: sent to Canadians and sellers featured don't ship to Canada. 

The latter aspect would be enough of an insult but the 'Canadian, eh?' headline doubles it. 

One final question: we all followed the email to its click-on-me source despite knowing that maybe we shouldn't just click on stuff in emails because it looks exactly like the kind of stuff that comes from ebay and we are used to seeing it from ebay. This is a perfect example of  'artisanal spam' which I posted about it another thread. Targeted to people who would be likely to follow it, and convincing enough to do so without question. How hard would it be for an outside party to figure out we would blindly do what an email like this told us to do? Not hard at all, I would think. 

If you find me suddenly selling iPhones from Russia as cheap as borscht, know I'm not, okay?