💬 Weekly Chat with the eBay Community Team- 05.04.23 @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. 

Please ask your questions in the thread below. In order to be able to answer your questions as quickly as possible, we ask you to have one question per post. Of course, you can make as many posts as you like in the Chat- the more the merrier!

Our eBay Community Team is made up of kat@ebay , dave@ebay  and katie@ebay . Between us, we have knowledge in Buying, Selling, ProTrader, Fulfilment, Parts & Accessories, 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. 

To ask your question, click Reply in the lower-right corner of this post, type your question, and click Reply between 2pm and 3pm. The community team will answer each incoming question in chronological order, and will quote the original question in each answer. 

Please note that any reply without a question to the community team or discussion replies may be removed from the chat. We want to keep on track to get through as many questions as possible. We welcome all discussion to be moved to the discussion boards. 

If you missed the weekly chat time, please ask your question in the community boards and tag us or we will be back next week with another chat! 

Many thanks,

Your eBay Community Team

[retroclub]

Thank you for taking the live questions. I wanted help with an issue where we set the same day cut off time for handling the order to 3PM and we clear all orders before that time on the day. We then have staff working an evening shift from 3pm to 8pm who I need to continue processing the next days orders. The problem we have faced since doing this our late delivery rate went from 0.25 for years to 2.5% so we stopped.

The postal service selected is Royal Mail 48/2nd class and cut off set to 3pm so the buyer will see shipping when purchasing as 2 to 4 days from the next day.

Royal Mail get the mail at 8pm but they don’t process it until the next day.

I don’t see an difference to a private seller/smaller seller using ebay labels and printing a shipping label for Royal Mail in the evening and then taking it to the post box the next day.

The difference is we need to do this on thousands of orders each week so we are worried our late delivery late will go sky high when it’s not actually late.

We are unsure if eBay are counting the first day as the day we mark the order as shipped which could be 8pm.

Could you advise?

[retrosweets]

Hopefully someone can offer some advice on this long term problem we have with selling limits and thank you for giving us the chance to speak to someone directly for support.

We feel like our ebay account is being limited on the amount of daily sales we can get either by volume of units or total £ sales.

We are struggling with flat line sales regardless of what we do on the account.

An example of daily sales:

Wed 1st March: £612
Thur 2nd Mach: £611
Friday: 3rd March: £639

Wed 15th: £660
Thur 16th: £632
Friday 17th: £632

We have days/months where the final total is EXACTLY the same. Which you might expect if you were selling the same type of item with the same price but we are working from 50,000 listings with different prices.

This is based on selling low value media in volume typically 200+ orders per day.

The listing limit/sold limit/transaction total value limit on the account arfe not even using 50%.

The ebay account is 20 years old, top rated seller, 99.8% feedback and in excllent standing with monthly transaction limit of 800k and 150,000 items. Return rate 0.01% late delivery 0.49% (caused by courier not us).

We have 50,000+ listings currently but sales were the same when we had 10,000 listing. What happens is we add new listings and the old ones stop selling. We take the new ones out of stock and the old ones start selling again so it's not an inventory quality problem.

If we send offers to buyers which can typically go to 2000+ people we will see an instant boost in sales 25% but that will follow the day after with a drop so it averages out over the 2 days as if we had not sent the offer. This can average out to £632 exactly on some days in the past.

We have sponsor adverts on 90% of our listing but when we have no sponsor adverts running the daily/weekly/month sales are still the same. Change the sponsor cap rate between 2% and automated no percentage the daily/weekly/month sales are still the same.

If we stop selling for a day we will get nearly double the volume the next day but the week will average out the same.

When we update our listings to £1 per listing more than other sellers the daily/weekly/month sales are still the same.

When we update our listing to 0.01p under other sellers and update daily the daily/weekly/month sales are still the same.

If we set the daily working cut off time to 4PM sales are the same if we have it set 6AM for same day dispatch.

I've tested having listings with no data/specs and listings with specs/data and it makes no difference.

I have talked to customer service multiple times who can't answer why we have this problem. 

I have talked to a memeber of the pro trader team in Ireland who advised we need to speak to the trust and security team which we have but they couldnt help.

Posted this from a different account to our listing account as I dont want this information showing in google results and linked to our brand/account.

I have seen lots of sellers with multiple accounts selling the same items which I assume is the way they get around it. This is not something I want to do and I assume selling the same items on the same account would be against rules anyway.

Can anyone help? 

[dave@ebay]

@retroclub wrote:

Thank you for taking the live questions. I wanted help with an issue where we set the same day cut off time for handling the order to 3PM and we clear all orders before that time on the day. We then have staff working an evening shift from 3pm to 8pm who I need to continue processing the next days orders. The problem we have faced since doing this our late delivery rate went from 0.25 for years to 2.5% so we stopped.

The postal service selected is Royal Mail 48/2nd class and cut off set to 3pm so the buyer will see shipping when purchasing as 2 to 4 days from the next day.

Royal Mail get the mail at 8pm but they don’t process it until the next day.

I don’t see an difference to a private seller/smaller seller using ebay labels and printing a shipping label for Royal Mail in the evening and then taking it to the post box the next day.

The difference is we need to do this on thousands of orders each week so we are worried our late delivery late will go sky high when it’s not actually late.

We are unsure if eBay are counting the first day as the day we mark the order as shipped which could be 8pm.

Could you advise?

---

Hi @retroclub 

It sounds like youre using RM Mailmark? So if you dispatch on time there is no scan to say it was to cover any late deliveries. 

I cant see whats happening on your account from here but I'll take this offline and follow up with you after the chat so I can have a look to see whats happening. 

Thanks,

Dave

[drymartini*]

Hi

It’s been more than a month since I started the thread below and since best-range subsequently started a similar thread: https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Technical-Issues/Ebay-Glitch-Vintage-amp-Antique-Jewellery-ebay-co-u...

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Technical-Issues/New-Glitch-UK-shops-have-either-very-reduced-or-0-i...

This glitch affects ALL SELLERS in many DIFFERENT categories who sell overseas.  It affects both business and private sellers, those with and without shops - in short, it is having a terribly detrimental effect on a very high proportion of ebay sellers.

When are we going to get an update on what ebay is doing to resolve this glitch?  This was promised by dave@ebay  on 10/3/23, but nothing has been forthcoming.  I feel completely let down by ebay over this issue and I am certain that other contributors to the thread feel exactly the same way.  Some answers please?

[nakedkeg]

Hi,

I’ve come across two recent instances where eBay appears to have incorrectly applied my postage rules on selling multiples of items, i.e how much the additional items increase the postage by.

I flagged this in a Help chat, a week ago, chased again via chat this morning, which your guy terminated before I was finished.

I now feel like I’m being fobbed off.

Having found one instance, then a second, it’s reasonable to assume there may be others on my own account.

If it’s happening to me, it’s also reasonable to think it may be happening to others.

I don't feel your CS guys were particularly interested.

EBay shouts about how they support small businesses in the U.K., I’m not feeling that.

I’m experiencing a clear disconnect between public messaging, versus the attitude of an organisation that’s happy to charge ever increasing fees to its sellers, apply payout holds for no reason, in the two transactions above charge me £70 in fees, whilst appearing to bump me £11.50 on the postage rule.

EBay haven’t earned their fee, if they can’t apply the postage charges to the buyer correctly based on the postage rules in the listing.

If eBay is really about supporting small businesses, it needs to wake up, and do much better, as it certainly feels like you’re pushing this small business away.

Three years ago, 90% of my business was through eBay, now that’s maybe 35%, I’m comfortable with that, my overall business continues to grow, and is more diverse.

There are other sales channels, which for my business cost less, burn less of my time, provide me with a better service, give better support when things do go wrong, make me feel more valued as a customer of their service, and deliver a better return on investment for my business.

If you want to retain that 35% of my business, please do better.

Please can you check if someone is actually looking at this postage charging issue, and get back to me?

Or, if you’re going to take the line that I’ve raised it, and it’s being dealt with, how long am I expected to wait for a response?

Please don’t tell me you can’t put a timeframe on a response, as your colleague has, there will be an internal service level target for responses, perhaps you can share that?

My perspective is that you’ve charged me fees, at the time of sale, for a service that it would appear you haven’t accurately delivered, and having queried this, I now feel like I’m being fobbed off.

Thanks,

Neil

[rainbowtrax]

Could I request that the postage cap for CDs be reviewed please. It is currently set at £3.50, the same price it was set at over a decade ago when postage caps were first introduced. The postage costs since then have increased massively but this has never been reflected in the postage cap.

There are now more and more CD box sets being released than ever before and all of these are classed as parcels, not large letters. It's impossible to send a CD box set by Royal Mail 1st Class within this low postage cap, the current price being £3.69. That's before you take ebay's fees into account. The postage cap for DVDs is £5.00. This is a comparable category having both lightweight single discs and heavier box sets. I know you can add the extra to the item price but it's an unnecessary faff. Please can the cap for CDs finally be brought into line with DVDs?

Tbh, it seems it would make more sense to abolish postage caps altogether as these were introduced before ebay charged FVF on postage. Now that the fee is paid on the full amount, there's no incentive for sellers to load the postage price so the caps have been pretty pointless for a number of years.

[darth_baggins]

When are we going to see a fix for items not being marked as dispatched for multi-item orders?

I happens every single time I have an order with more than one (different) item in the order, and has been happening for at least 6 months.

I have one right now, it says 'dispatched 5th April' but is still there in awaiting dispatch. The only way round it is to go into the order, mark it as not dispatched, refresh the page then mark it as dispatched. But even this isn't foolproof, if there are 4 items in the order I have to do this 4 times.

It's poor when a well documented and much-discussed bug is allowed to be on a 'world class' retail site for so long without being addressed.

[kat@ebay]

---

---

Hi @retrosweets ,

We are not able to provide sales growth support here but we have checked your account to see if there is any restrictions or limitations that would impact sales and there is none. 

You can reach out to customer support to have a review done for further information. Contact us option here

Thank you,

Kat

[kat@ebay]

Hi @nakedkeg ,

Can you provide me with the item number and date of the transaction and will review offline.

Thank you,

Kat

[retroclub]

Thanks Dave, using Royal Mail business CRL service so all items have a QR code for tracking but it's not required by Royal Mail for the post worker to scan the item so it will only be scanned/marked as delivered on eBay if the QR code is scanned.

If we mark the item as shipped at 8pm today on eBay my worry is does ebay then say this is DAY 1 so the expected delivery date would be one day sooner than if we had marked it as shipped one minute after midnight on the actual day RM will process it.

[kat@ebay]

---

@rainbowtrax wrote:

Could I request that the postage cap for CDs be reviewed please. It is currently set at £3.50, the same price it was set at over a decade ago when postage caps were first introduced. The postage costs since then have increased massively but this has never been reflected in the postage cap.

There are now more and more CD box sets being released than ever before and all of these are classed as parcels, not large letters. It's impossible to send a CD box set by Royal Mail 1st Class within this low postage cap, the current price being £3.69. That's before you take ebay's fees into account. The postage cap for DVDs is £5.00. This is a comparable category having both lightweight single discs and heavier box sets. I know you can add the extra to the item price but it's an unnecessary faff. Please can the cap for CDs finally be brought into line with DVDs?

Tbh, it seems it would make more sense to abolish postage caps altogether as these were introduced before ebay charged FVF on postage. Now that the fee is paid on the full amount, there's no incentive for sellers to load the postage price so the caps have been pretty pointless for a number of years.

---

Hi @rainbowtrax ,

We appreciate your feedback on the postage cap for CD's.  While we cannot guarantee a change for this policy I will share your insight with the relevant team in eBay for review.

Thank you,

Kat

[retroclub]

Hi Kat@eBay.

Please could you check my account to see if we have anything which would impact sales like this?

---

kat@ebay wrote:

---

---

Hi @retrosweets ,

We are not able to provide sales growth support here but we have checked your account to see if there is any restrictions or limitations that would impact sales and there is none. 

You can reach out to customer support to have a review done for further information. Contact us option here

Thank you,

Kat

---

[dave@ebay]

---

@drymartini* wrote:

Hi

It’s been more than a month since I started the thread below and since best-range subsequently started a similar thread: https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Technical-Issues/Ebay-Glitch-Vintage-amp-Antique-Jewellery-ebay-co-u...

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Technical-Issues/New-Glitch-UK-shops-have-either-very-reduced-or-0-i...

This glitch affects ALL SELLERS in many DIFFERENT categories who sell overseas.  It affects both business and private sellers, those with and without shops - in short, it is having a terribly detrimental effect on a very high proportion of ebay sellers.

When are we going to get an update on what ebay is doing to resolve this glitch?  This was promised by dave@ebay  on 10/3/23, but nothing has been forthcoming.  I feel completely let down by ebay over this issue and I am certain that other contributors to the thread feel exactly the same way.  Some answers please?

---

Hi @drymartini* 

There was a change to how items are displays on international sites. All listings are showing in search how they should but if you don't have a shop on that site they wont show when you visit the sellers shop through a site they are not registered on. This in now way has an impact on how buyers view your items in best match.

Depending on how you're items are listed they might not show when viewing sellers other items. If the category doesn't exist on the secondary site it will show in search results but not when you view sellers other items. The is usually what causes the difference in listing totals across the different regions.

Thanks,

Dave

Thanks,

Dave

[nakedkeg]

Hi Kat,

Thanks for your reply, details as follows....

333534459640 28th March 9.48am

333534461844  11th Feb 2.47pm

These are the two transactions that your CS guys have the details for.

Regards,

Neil

[presentdays]

Hi,

I received an email today from eBay telling me that by adding gtin numbers to some of my listings will help improve their visibility on promotions.

It says there are 41 listings with an issue but they are not listed on my overview and the few that are listed on the email when clicked do not have the option to add a barcode.

Any help appreciated

[kat@ebay]

---

@darth_baggins wrote:

When are we going to see a fix for items not being marked as dispatched for multi-item orders?

I happens every single time I have an order with more than one (different) item in the order, and has been happening for at least 6 months.

I have one right now, it says 'dispatched 5th April' but is still there in awaiting dispatch. The only way round it is to go into the order, mark it as not dispatched, refresh the page then mark it as dispatched. But even this isn't foolproof, if there are 4 items in the order I have to do this 4 times.

It's poor when a well documented and much-discussed bug is allowed to be on a 'world class' retail site for so long without being addressed.

---

Hi @darth_baggins ,

 I understand the frustration with getting this bug fixed. While there are different tech issues being investigated at any given time they have to work on a priority basis depending on the issues.  I will follow up with tech on this one to ensure its being worked on.

Thank you,

Kat

[dave@ebay]

---

@retroclub wrote:

Thanks Dave, using Royal Mail business CRL service so all items have a QR code for tracking but it's not required by Royal Mail for the post worker to scan the item so it will only be scanned/marked as delivered on eBay if the QR code is scanned.

If we mark the item as shipped at 8pm today on eBay my worry is does ebay then say this is DAY 1 so the expected delivery date would be one day sooner than if we had marked it as shipped one minute after midnight on the actual day RM will process it.

---

Hi @retroclub 

Thats correct, once the item marks as dispatched it counts as day one. It sounds its overriding your cut off time. I will need to look further into it to make sure that's whats happening. 

Thanks,

Dave

[kat@ebay]

---

@retroclub wrote:

Hi Kat@eBay.

Please could you check my account to see if we have anything which would impact sales like this?

---

kat@ebay wrote:

---

---

Hi @retrosweets ,

We are not able to provide sales growth support here but we have checked your account to see if there is any restrictions or limitations that would impact sales and there is none. 

You can reach out to customer support to have a review done for further information. Contact us option here

Thank you,

Kat

---

---

Hi @retroclub ,

We have had this account checked and there is no restrictions or limitations that would be impacting sales.

Thank you,

Kat

[kat@ebay]

---

@nakedkeg wrote:

Hi Kat,

Thanks for your reply, details as follows....

333534459640 28th March 9.48am

333534461844  11th Feb 2.47pm

These are the two transactions that your CS guys have the details for.

Regards,

Neil

---

Hi @nakedkeg ,

Thanks for the details. I'll need to take this offline in order to review and will follow up with you.

Thank you,

Kat