Cancellation Pending for Over an Hour

[ecgt]

There seems to be something weird going on this morning with cancellations. We had a customer purchase an item last night and not provide their street address. When this happens, we cancel the transaction using the "Issue with buyer's shipping address" option. This happens at least once a month. Generally speaking, the cancellation takes a few minutes to complete.

This morning we cancelled the transaction. After an hour and a half it is still listed a pending in the "Cancel Details" section. We have not received an email from eBay confirming that the cancellation has been completed. However, the money has been removed from our Payments section in Managed Payments.

This is taking far longer than usual. Has anyone experienced this and, if so, how long did you have to wait before the cancellation was processed?

Thanks in advance for your insights.

TLDR: Cancellation taking over an hour. What gives?

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

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@ecgt wrote:

There seems to be something weird going on this morning with cancellations. We had a customer purchase an item last night and not provide their street address. When this happens, we cancel the transaction using the "Issue with buyer's shipping address" option. This happens at least once a month. Generally speaking, the cancellation takes a few minutes to complete.

This morning we cancelled the transaction. After an hour and a half it is still listed a pending in the "Cancel Details" section. We have not received an email from eBay confirming that the cancellation has been completed. However, the money has been removed from our Payments section in Managed Payments.

This is taking far longer than usual. Has anyone experienced this and, if so, how long did you have to wait before the cancellation was processed?

Thanks in advance for your insights.

TLDR: Cancellation taking over an hour. What gives?

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tyler@ebay

Heads up.

-Lotz

[ecgt]

More than three hours have now gone by and the cancellation is still pending. This is starting to become very concerning.

[recped]

What is the concern?

I have to ask, do you just cancel or do you attempt to clarify the address issue with the buyer?

You say this happens on a regular basis, in 23 years on eBay I've never had a sale where the buyer didn't provide a Street address, mangled slightly perhaps but entirely absent....never that I can recall.

[ecgt]

We always cancel when there is an issue with the address. If the address is incorrect, sellers are not covered if something goes wrong. This is our standard practice and follows eBay policies. That said, we always communicate this with the buyer and offer options for our buyers to repurchase the item once they have fixed their address. Ultimately, we are not willing to ship to incorrect addresses given the hassel that such situations have caused us in the past.

A missing street address is uncommon. When I said that this happens to us on a regular basis, I meant incorrect addresses in general. An issue with an incorrect address happens at to us at least once per quarter (usually monthly). The most common example is when someone has moved to a completely different address than the one on file. Another common incorrect address issue is when a buyer provides a postal code or ZIP code that does not line up with their address (for example, a postal code for Calgary when then address is in Ottawa).

The concern here is that cancellations generally only take a few minutes. The longest we have waited for a cancellation before today was under thirty minutes. More than three hours should not happen and has never happened before to us. Hopefully this will not become a trend: cancellations that remain pending for an unreasonable amount of time are concerning to us.

[ecgt · Accepted solution]

We finally received confirmation that the cancellation has been completed. This took over three and a half hours. Hopefully this will not become a trend concerning cancellations and is merely a blip.