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Every couple of months this issue comes up and wastes my time. This may be catching way bigger sellers than myself, so hopefully it can help more people. Thus I am hoping someone at eBay can address this bug. tyler@ebay perhaps? The buyer wants to give me money, it helps me. It helps eBay. Win-win! But they need me to edit an invoice before paying double for shipping.
I have looked under my Payment policy and immediate payment is unchecked there.
Using the app and a browser in mobile mode, I can see that it says "Immediate Payment" is required when using buy it now. Why? If eBay code is overriding my setting... why is it there?
I do not see this on a normal web browser but maybe it is there and I am missing it.
Thanks!
It's the mysterious forced IPR and yes it is extremely annoying.
This was an effort by eBay that was announced 6 or 7 years ago, that items that sold for less than $1000 that offered payment by PayPal could be subject to IPR regardless of seller settings. It was "sold" to sellers as eBay being proactive in reducing non-payment situations. For awhile it was even documented in the Help files.
At some point it was all cleansed and purged from the original announcement (a Seller Update in 2012?) and then later all references were removed from the help pages (I've searched in vain).
There are lots of theories on what actually drives this situation, here are a few:
- The App, apparently the "request total" button is not available at all, not at any time under any circumstances. So mobile users are out of luck.
- A "bad" combination of items in the buyers Cart, in theory multiple currencies across different sellers blocks the button (unproven)
- Certain buyers, perhaps known non or slow payers are blocked from Request Total (possible but unproven)
- Buyers from specific countries (definitely not true)
- Seller must not have set "yes - I combine" in their settings (definitely not true)
- Cart contains discounted items even if from other sellers (not likely because buyers report the issue when they only have items from a single seller in their cart)
The subject comes up frequently, eBay reps when they comment might say they are unaware of a problem and will look into it. Nothing every comes of it and nothing changes.
Just last night........
One US buyer (who wants shipping to a forwarder in Florida so probably NOT an actual US buyer), purchases 3 items, hits the Request Total button and asks for a combined invoice.
20 minutes later a Canadian buyer asks about combined shipping rates for 3 items, I give him the rate and explain to add the items to their Cart and Request Total. A few minutes later he informs me the Request Total button is greyed out (I made a custom listing for him that included the 3 items and proper shipping).
Most of time buyers just pay the inflated shipping and I have to process a partial refund. That is a pain and under the current PayPal payment system one loses the fvf on the portion refunded.
The REALLY bad situation is the buyers who don't add to cart, they simply buy and are forced into checkout for that single item, then buyer another and another each time being forced to pay. when this happens it's a loss of fvf and 30 cent transaction fees.
Because this is randomly applied plenty of buyers don't understand at all why one day they can buy multiple items one at a time or add to the cart and request a total and the next day they can't.
What is truly infuriating is that IPR is an option that is available to all sellers and has been for about 15 years or so. Why not let sellers apply the option by choice? If eBay thinks we can't handle the responsibility then make it On by default and let sellers who don't need it turn it off.
Non-payments seem to affect certain sellers much more than others, Auction style listings have always been a problem but eBay's background system doesn't do anything for that. Some Categories seems to attract non-payers (and plenty of other problems) but for most sellers non-payment is a non-issue or at worst a very minor irritant.
Personally I have to initiate UPI's once or twice a year and can't remember the last time I actually had to close a UPI because payment was never forthcoming.
I am hopeful (but uncertain) that once in Managed Payments the partial refund process will be easier and will result in a refund to sellers of ALL fees. The pages of MP policies allude to this but is hardly definitive and uses weasel statements like "fees may be refunded".
Hi @wecango88 - @recped is essentially correct* in their interpretation: immediate payment is required when a buyer uses the 'buy it now' button, the total cost is less than $1,000, paid with PayPal or a merchant credit card, where the shipping cost is specified for the buyer. The intent is to keep your items visible to buyers until they're paid for, reducing the number of unpaid item cases you have to deal with. Thanks!
*I had to do some digging but it looks like it was the 2013 spring update, along with a lot of other interesting tidbits. How things change!
tyler@ebay wrote:
*I had to do some digging but it looks like it was the 2013 spring update, along with a lot of other interesting tidbits. How things change!
Tyler, thanks for posting that, I'm going to bookmark it because I have gone looking for it many times but never found it.
I will withdraw my claim that it was cleansed from the original announcement but for the time being I'll stick with my claim that it used to be in the Help pages but went away in one of the redesigns / simplifications of the help sections.
Stop press! OK I figured out how to find the links to the old Seller Update announcements, they are not "hidden" just buried really deep (but more easily found through a Google search).
FYI - This particular issue is at the very top of my actually quite short list of terrible policies! (you can pass that along to the ivory tower!)
I'm still hoping that the UpFront in October can go back to an actual in person event and I can get a chance to meet you in person (and have you hand me my swag bag!).
Hahaha - Happy to help with that! I ended up finding an offhanded mention of the year on an archive search on .com which then meant I had something meaningful to Google, et voila.
As to Help Pages, I agree with you - I think it was removed in the simplification/update project that happened over the last few years.
I'd love to hand you that swag-bag someday. 🙂 Who knows how things will work out though - at the rate that things are going it feels like it will be a while. Fingers crossed for October still!
