Weekly Chat with the eBay Community Team- 04.02.26 @2pm

[community-team@ebay]

Hi everybody!

The Community Chat will open at 2pm and will remain open until 3pm on Wednesday. After that it will be closed for further questions. Of course, we will continue to take care of answering any questions that may still be unanswered—We’ll get to everything as quickly as possible.

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Our eBay Community Team is made up of kat@ebay, marco@ebay and dave@ebay. Between us, we have knowledge in Buying, Selling, Fulfilment, Payments, and the Community itself. Anything we aren’t sure on we’ll know the people who will be! Please ask us any questions you may have and we’ll do all we can to support. We understand that certain topics, such as concerns about businesses possibly using private accounts, can be frustrating and important to you. Please refrain from asking the same question repeatedly in our weekly live chats. We assure you that we carefully review all posts in the forum and ensure that your concerns are communicated to the relevant teams for appropriate action.
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Many thanks,

Your eBay Community Team

[retrogam3s]

Hello,

In last week’s chat I reported various technical issues with order number 27-14108-61323 (item number 127611776567). Just to quickly recap:

• The buyer wishes to cancel the order, but an error message is preventing me from doing so.
• The payment has been stuck processing since January 21st, with a completion date of January 22nd. This was now 2 weeks ago.
• The order has completely disappeared from my order history, and cannot be found with any search terms including the item title, item number or order number.
• Clicking the order from the “payment processing” page brings up the error message “Unfortunately, there has been an error retrieving your order. Please try again later”.

I appreciate that you have reported the technical issues to the relevant team, and thank you for your help. This is truly appreciated, as all my phone calls to eBay customer services have otherwise been met with total confusion, or promises to call me back which they do not honour and no call back ever happens.

However, it’s been another week and unfortunately none of the issues have been fixed.

I could understand how this may be a low priority to fix if this was an ordinary, unexceptional technical issue that was simply causing a minor inconvenience when browsing the website. However, this glitch is causing £83.94 of the buyer’s money to be indefinitely stuck. To many, this is not a small sum of money. The buyer has been waiting for over 2 weeks to get this back, and there is absolutely nothing that I can do about it.

As I’m sure you can understand, this is not a good look on either my business or on eBay as a whole. It is not in my best interest – and hopefully not in eBay’s best interest – to keep this buyer waiting for their money back indefinitely.

Are there any updates that can be provided on this – is still being looked into? And given the nature of the glitch where real money is being held up in the system, can this please be treated as more of a priority to fix?

Thank you.

[marco@ebay]

Hi retrogam3s, thanks for your message.

Yes, this was reported, and the issue was replicated, so it is currently being looked into. However, as advised last week, we don't have an estimated fix time, but I would let you know once they confirm to me that the issue has been resolved. So, once this is resolved and they let me know, I will confirm it to you.

Thank you,

Marco

[retrogam3s]

That is all fine, and I appreciate that it is being looked into. As you can however understand, I'm keeping the buyer waiting for a very long time, and my business is having to take the fall for eBay's technical issues. If eBay are comfortable with leaving the buyer without their money for several weeks then that is on them, but I'm certainly not comfortable in doing so.

Hopefully there will be no negative impact on my account as a result of this.

[marco@ebay]

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@retrogam3s wrote:

That is all fine, and I appreciate that it is being looked into. As you can however understand, I'm keeping the buyer waiting for a very long time, and my business is having to take the fall for eBay's technical issues. If eBay are comfortable with leaving the buyer without their money for several weeks then that is on them, but I'm certainly not comfortable in doing so.

Hopefully there will be no negative impact on my account as a result of this.

---

Thanks for your reply, retrogam3s.

Yes, we are aware of that, and we do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you wish, you can manually refund the buyer, or get them to open an item not received case to refund them that way. If you get a defect in your account, you can let me know and if it was caused due to the technical issue, we would remove it.

Thank you,

Marco

[retrogam3s]

I cannot manually refund the buyer, as explained the transaction has completely disappeared from my order history - so I cannot view the transaction, or any options associated with it (including the option to send a refund). Presumably, the transaction has disappeared from the buyer's end also - so they would not be able to open a case.

As it stands, there is no possible way to give the buyer their money back until eBay fixes this.

Thank you however for letting me know that any potential defect will be removed, if it comes to that. This is reassuring.

[lesjo_69]

Hi, Monday 2nd February pm spoke to Customer Services regarding issue with not being able to answer messages. Said 24/48hours would get back to me. Still waiting so thought perhaps you have come across this issue before. Account is verified and I was asked to check out of cookies, cache data blocking access (done what I can here, an not an expert around this kind of thing). Am using laptop. No matter what I do in Messages and/ or clicking direct on the emails I received at weekend asking questions about 2 items I have up for sale all I get is a blue box pop up which will not let me write anything into it. Just tried to attach photo of the blue box but wrong format. 

Anything you can do to assist , any suggestions to resolve please ?

Thank you

[jamjartoys]

Hi guys,

Just one to feed back to the shipping team — and to ask whether any adjustment can be made around this.

In real-world conditions, we’re currently seeing Royal Mail take up to 10 days to deliver a Second Class Large Letter. Whilst not the longest delay we have seen; we had an example delivered today that was posted on 27th Jan, purchased on the 26th.

Despite a 2-day handling period, the delivery window shown to the buyer in eBay was 28th–29th Jan, which simply isn’t achievable at the moment. An Item Not Received case was opened on 2nd Feb (the buyer was excellent to deal with us), but the issue is clearly the delivery estimate rather than dispatch performance.

We’ve also noticed that delivery estimates being shown appear to be getting shorter rather than longer — for example, an order placed today shows dispatch by the 6th with estimated delivery 6th/7th, which again doesn’t reflect current Royal Mail performance.

Given this, could I ask whether:

• The INR opening deadline can be extended to better reflect current Royal Mail delivery times, or

• eBay can raise this with Royal Mail at a national level, as the estimates being shown don’t match what’s happening on the ground.

At the moment this is creating avoidable INR cases and where is my item emails, despite items being dispatched correctly and on time.

Please don't default to its working as designed as in the real world it isn't.

Thanks for taking a look.

David

[kat@ebay]

---

@lesjo_69 wrote:

Hi, Monday 2nd February pm spoke to Customer Services regarding issue with not being able to answer messages. Said 24/48hours would get back to me. Still waiting so thought perhaps you have come across this issue before. Account is verified and I was asked to check out of cookies, cache data blocking access (done what I can here, an not an expert around this kind of thing). Am using laptop. No matter what I do in Messages and/ or clicking direct on the emails I received at weekend asking questions about 2 items I have up for sale all I get is a blue box pop up which will not let me write anything into it. Just tried to attach photo of the blue box but wrong format. 

Anything you can do to assist , any suggestions to resolve please ?

Thank you

---

Hi @lesjo_69 ,

We do actually have an open ticket with tech for an issue with a blue screen showing for users when trying to view or access messages. Is it happening for you on viewing the messages or when you try to send a message?

Thank you,

Kat

[lesjo_69]

Hi there, when I try to see messages sent to me - jpg image attached.

[marco@ebay]

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@retrogam3s wrote:

I cannot manually refund the buyer, as explained the transaction has completely disappeared from my order history - so I cannot view the transaction, or any options associated with it (including the option to send a refund). Presumably, the transaction has disappeared from the buyer's end also - so they would not be able to open a case.

As it stands, there is no possible way to give the buyer their money back until eBay fixes this.

Thank you however for letting me know that any potential defect will be removed, if it comes to that. This is reassuring.

---

Thanks for your reply, retrogam3s.

I've just checked there, and it looks like the order has disappeared indeed. Normally, when this happens the payment that is processing will time out, and then it is automatically reverted to the buyer. However, I will keep an eye on it, just in case, and if I get further updates on it, I will let you know.

Thank you,

Marco

[dave@ebay]

---

@jamjartoys wrote:

Hi guys,

Just one to feed back to the shipping team — and to ask whether any adjustment can be made around this.

In real-world conditions, we’re currently seeing Royal Mail take up to 10 days to deliver a Second Class Large Letter. Whilst not the longest delay we have seen; we had an example delivered today that was posted on 27th Jan, purchased on the 26th.

Despite a 2-day handling period, the delivery window shown to the buyer in eBay was 28th–29th Jan, which simply isn’t achievable at the moment. An Item Not Received case was opened on 2nd Feb (the buyer was excellent to deal with us), but the issue is clearly the delivery estimate rather than dispatch performance.

We’ve also noticed that delivery estimates being shown appear to be getting shorter rather than longer — for example, an order placed today shows dispatch by the 6th with estimated delivery 6th/7th, which again doesn’t reflect current Royal Mail performance.

Given this, could I ask whether:

• The INR opening deadline can be extended to better reflect current Royal Mail delivery times, or

• eBay can raise this with Royal Mail at a national level, as the estimates being shown don’t match what’s happening on the ground.

At the moment this is creating avoidable INR cases and where is my item emails, despite items being dispatched correctly and on time.

Please don't default to its working as designed as in the real world it isn't.

Thanks for taking a look.

David

---

Hi @jamjartoys 

Thanks for the above, I've sent it over to my contact on the shipping team to review.  He asked if you could send over the item IDs and he will have a look at what's happening. You can mail them to contactcommunity@ebay.com and I'll get them over to him. 

We wouldn't be able to extend the INR times because this is built into the site and although it seems like a small change it could impact a lot of different parts of the site. 

Ill reach out to you directly with anything sharable that I get back from shipping. 

Thanks,

Dave

[kat@ebay]

---

@lesjo_69 wrote:

Hi there, when I try to see messages sent to me - jpg image attached.

---

Hi @lesjo_69 ,

Thanks for the screenshot, its really helpful. That looks to be the same issue. I'll add your account to the open ticket and let you know once there is an update. 

I appreciate you have already cleared cache and cookies which is what we would usually advise to help resolve as a first step. Other options to try if you haven't already would be to try to send messages from a different browser and try from the app.

Thank you,

Kat

[lesjo_69]

Hi Kat & thank you - good suggestions which I will try.