💬Weekly Chat with the eBay Community Team- 12.10.22 @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 refrain from opening discussions here, any posts without questions may be removed.

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

[babybitz08]

Good afternoon everyone

There was a question in last week’s chat regarding the issue of people registered as private sellers who are clearly running a business.  They do not comply with distance selling regulations which require business sellers to provide contact information and offer returns.  Also ebay are missing out on fees as these sellers get 1000 free listings a month and offers of lower final value fees, neither of which they are entitled to.  As they pay lower fees, they are able to undercut genuine business sellers who follow the rules, many of whom are the small businesses that ebay claim they want to support.  This puts business sellers at a disadvantage, particularly those who sell low price items.

The response was that ebay will take action and we should continue to report these sellers.  However, I have reported many such items in the past and can see that the same sellers are still running businesses under private accounts (as they have multiples of brand new items and hundreds of such listings).

My question is, what is the mechanism we should be using to report them?  There only seems to be the option to report an item and not the option to report a seller.  Under ‘report this item’ there is no clear ‘category’ or ‘reason’ for unregistered business sellers.  Should we be selecting:

Listing practices > avoiding ebay fees

Listing practices > other listing practice policy violations > business seller fails to display correct contact details

Something else?

Please could we have clear guidance on the specific options we should be selecting to report these sellers so that ebay can clearly identify them and take appropriate action and please would ebay consider adding a specific option ‘unregistered business seller’ to the list under ‘Report this item’.

As an example, I follow one such seller who has over 2,100 listings and nearly 5,500 feedbacks who has been running a business under a private account for many years and, despite being reported several times, ebay has not forced them to register as a business seller.

[kimbub16]

Hy  following  up after last week concerning  non payment from Ebay you finished  by saying the payment was included  in the £116 79 incorrect  for your attention  September 20th   ID  270912135339 net to me £55 07  ID 110912194351 Net to me £61 07 making a total  of£116 79 both items were sent to same buyer  still outstanding  is ID 160910740050 £46 27 WHICH  HAS NOT BEEN PAYED INTO MY ACCOUNT 

[kat@ebay]

---

community-team@ebay wrote:

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 refrain from opening discussions here, any posts without questions may be removed.

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

---

Hi @babybitz08 ,

I understand the fustration but that is the process to report. This is a correct option to report Listing practices > avoid eBay fees> other ways of avoiding eBay fees

There are alot of these types of accounts that action is taken on on a regular basis but we don't publicly share this. One thing that was mentioned on this issue last week is that eBay cannot give information on how these type of accounts are reviewed. Giving this kind of detail allows policies to be circumvented and therefore cannot be shared.

Thank you,

Kat

[iceblue_uk]

Hi Guys. Is there a site issue with the messaging system?

For several months now it has been difficult to reply to messages, in that it can take 10 - 30 seconds to open the reply window. Sometimes it opens after this wait, other times this error page appears...

When it does open and on sending a reply, in many cases the error page also appears and, when that happens, only half the time has the reply actually been sent. I often receive 2,3 or 4 copies of buyer's message, I guess they're seeing that error page and sending again.

[babybitz08]

Hi Kat,

Thank you for answering my question.  I understand that ebay can't give information on how these accounts are reviewed but the outcome is visible to us all as business sellers are clearly identified in the information to the right on each listing.  A seller with over 2000 listings with brand new items some of which have variations cannot be anything but a business seller and is it frustrating to see them being allowed to continue as a private seller.

[kat@ebay]

---

@kimbub16 wrote:

Hy  following  up after last week concerning  non payment from Ebay you finished  by saying the payment was included  in the £116 79 incorrect  for your attention  September 20th   ID  270912135339 net to me £55 07  ID 110912194351 Net to me £61 07 making a total  of£116 79 both items were sent to same buyer  still outstanding  is ID 160910740050 £46 27 WHICH  HAS NOT BEEN PAYED INTO MY ACCOUNT 

---

Hi @kimbub16,

You would have received the amount of £116.79 in a lump sum for the payout of the 20th of September. This total amount included transactions from different items including the transacation for item  275457118480 that you queried last week.  If you click into the payout ID for the 20th of September on your account it will show you all the transactions included in the £116.79.

Thank you,

Kat

[katie@ebay]

---

@iceblue_uk wrote:

Hi Guys. Is there a site issue with the messaging system?

For several months now it has been difficult to reply to messages, in that it can take 10 - 30 seconds to open the reply window. Sometimes it opens after this wait, other times this error page appears...

When it does open and on sending a reply, in many cases the error page also appears and, when that happens, only half the time has the reply actually been sent. I often receive 2,3 or 4 copies of buyer's message, I guess they're seeing that error page and sending again.

---

Hi @iceblue_uk,

I don't see any open technical issues with similar experience to what you are showing above. We'd be happy to take a closer look. 

Could you share some following information for me please?

• Browser
• Which messaging access point are you using on the site? eg via seller hub, via your profile page etc.

Many thanks,

Katie 

[kempseykate]

I once again reported an unregistered business seller this morning - 100 idential new item for sale (just on one listing) and 18K of sales in total. I doubt that anything will happen, as nothing has happened on the many previous times I have reported.

As the poster said last week, we neither want or need ebay to 'share' what they have done. If an unregistered business seller is still an unregistered business seller, then ebay have done nothing - it is there for all to see 😞

Why will ebay not act on these sellers? 

Incidentally, there is no point usuing the 'other way of evading fees' option, as there is no comments box to state why fees are being evaded .. and I doubt very much that a robot will pick up a reason why, and I'm not sure that a human would either, unless it is spelled out to them.

[b4before]

It seems eBay is behind on offering a scan at post office option for Royal Mail posting. Do you have plans to introduce this? If not why not? Thanks, I’m spending a lot on ink & paper and destroying the planet!

Elspeth Brown

[phillipshobbies]

Hi eBay, 

We recently received notification that you are discontinuing the Shopify App on the 31st of December 2022. We use this app to create and manage all of our listings, inventory and fulfilment. Why has eBay decided to make this decision when it will have such an impact on small businesses like ours? The only possible alternative is to pay hundreds of pounds a year to a third-party provider - an additional and significant expense that sellers could definitely do without.  

We want to continue growing on eBay, but you're making it much harder for us to do so, by discontinuing an app which is so vital to many. I hope eBay will reconsider this 🙂

George

[kimbub16]

Incorrect I sold 3 items totalling  £113,16 yet have only been payed £116 ? How do work that out ? 

[kimbub16]

Sorry that should read £161 for the 3 items

[katie@ebay]

---

@b4before wrote:

It seems eBay is behind on offering a scan at post office option for Royal Mail posting. Do you have plans to introduce this? If not why not? Thanks, I’m spending a lot on ink & paper and destroying the planet!

Elspeth Brown

---

Hi @b4before,

At the moment eBay offers this service in return cases but not with outbound sales like you mentioned. It is a great insight and we will pass it onto the shipping team. With changes and action happening on Royal Mail's side at this time I don't think this will be introduced in the short term. 

Thanks,

Katie

[oakley_home_and_gifts]

I get ebay can't share the outcome of an investigation. But if sellers like myself and many others are reporting private sellers over and over again for accounts which clearly trade as a business. Which is in breach of ebay's own terms and conditions as well as distance selling regulations. Why is ebay not doing more to either remove these accounts or make them registers as a business acount and supply the correct information for buyers. 

The outcome can be seen quite clearly on the account that they are still trading as a private account with no return policy and no business information which is required for any business trading online. Some of these have been doing it for years and continue to get away with it. 

[kat@ebay]

---

@kempseykate wrote:

I once again reported an unregistered business seller this morning - 100 idential new item for sale (just on one listing) and 18K of sales in total. I doubt that anything will happen, as nothing has happened on the many previous times I have reported.

As the poster said last week, we neither want or need ebay to 'share' what they have done. If an unregistered business seller is still an unregistered business seller, then ebay have done nothing - it is there for all to see 😞

Why will ebay not act on these sellers? 

Incidentally, there is no point usuing the 'other way of evading fees' option, as there is no comments box to state why fees are being evaded .. and I doubt very much that a robot will pick up a reason why, and I'm not sure that a human would either, unless it is spelled out to them.

---

Hi @kempseykate ,

We absolutely do understand where yourself and the other members are coming from in reporting these types of accounts.  Right now reporting them through the site is the process. While you may not see immediate action taken on accounts reported by yourself and other members there are a number of accounts actioned for selling like businesses under a private status. 

We will link in on our side with the risk teams to follow up on processes that are in place and share the feedback from these boards with them.

Thank you,

Kat

[kat@ebay]

---

@kimbub16 wrote:

Incorrect I sold 3 items totalling  £113,16 yet have only been payed £116 ? How do work that out ? 

---

Hi @kimbub16 ,

As we can't go into specific details like this regarding transactions on the boards I will take this offline for review and  I will come back to you.

Thank you,

Kat

[wifi]

Good afternoon boys and girlsi hope you all are well.

My question is, if I enrolled in global shipping programme and I got overseas sales, do I still receive postage fee say £3  that normally charge to UK address?  And when involved overseas returns request do I have to pay for the international returns postage ? 

Thank you.

[kimbub16]

Thank you

[katie@ebay]

---

@phillipshobbies wrote:

Hi eBay, 

We recently received notification that you are discontinuing the Shopify App on the 31st of December 2022. We use this app to create and manage all of our listings, inventory and fulfilment. Why has eBay decided to make this decision when it will have such an impact on small businesses like ours? The only possible alternative is to pay hundreds of pounds a year to a third-party provider - an additional and significant expense that sellers could definitely do without.  

We want to continue growing on eBay, but you're making it much harder for us to do so, by discontinuing an app which is so vital to many. I hope eBay will reconsider this 🙂

George

---

Hi George,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this and how it may impact your business. The eBay app on Shopify is scheduled to be discontinued and there is a clear-cut date as to when this will take place.

You should have received an email with further information if you do use the app. I will share your insights with the team.

Thanks,

Katie