Thinking of quitting as a seller

[redcap-rcw]

Over the past few months I'm finding that the eBay platform is getting harder and harder to use for sellers. I've tried submitting feedback on various pages but of course you get no response and nothing changes, I feel like I'm just banging my head against a brick wall an eBay couldn't give a damn as the money just keeps rolling in for them and if I do quit there'll be plenty of others willing to take my place.

Maybe I'm just not tech savvy enough to make the site work but, things just seem to needlessly change and not for the better.

1) Since before Christmas 2023 but with increasing frequency the site or at least my access to it goes down. It typically seems to happen when I'm trying to do several things or bulk actions. More often than not it is when I'm trying to purchase postage labels, I'll usually have around 50 orders to post at a time. I select the orders go to purchase labels and watch with baited breath as eBay slowly works it way through each order, on at least half the days I can expect it to get part way through before deciding there is some issue and just giving me a red exclamation mark next to the remaining orders with a link to retry which does nothing. This can take anything from about 10 mins to several hours to rectify itself. Sometimes it means I miss my despatch deadline as I am forced to just give up. eBay also often seems to hang when posting new listings or modifying existing ones,  I'm forced to refresh and then just get a page saying "our homepage is down"

2) Bulk labels and postage. This used to work great and was a big time saver for me, but coupled with the above I now find that I can't specify at a listing level that my item is posted as a large letter, it seems to automatically default to letter below 100g and large letter over 100g, the issue is virtually all of my items are under 100g but need to go as large letters, this means that most of the time I now have to change 50 items individually, I can't even just overstate the weight as the price of a large letter increases at 101g. To add to this frustration, sometimes it will let me bulk update my postage to large letter and sometimes it will not, I think based on if there is already a mix of postage types or not.

3) This is kind of on me, but I tend to get easily distracted, I might purchase my labels and want to come back and print them off later. The issue being as soon as you exit the page and come back all your orders on screen and on the picklist are in a completely different order to the labels, so now I have to print 50 labels off and then one by one scan through the picklist trying to find what the person ordered instead of just going down the list in order.

This coupled with all the usual gripes of Chinese sellers pretending to be in the UK and undercutting me, the rip off of promoted listings and trying to keep my items relevant, I've reached the point where it just doesn't feel worth the effort and eBay just want to frustrate me at every turn.

I've already quit my shop subscription as I only have around 20 product lines it just doesn't seem worth the cost and I refuse to give eBay any more of my money than I absolutely have to.

[bits_n_bobs_heaven]

My suggestions would include:

Building your own website, if you already haven't and also expanding and using other selling platforms which are either free or have smaller charges in comparison to eBay. Personally, I would keep well clear of FB Market place as it has a series of issues.

As for your postage label issues, my suggestion would be to open direct accounts with the postage/shipping suppliers direct and there is usually an option where you can upload a CVS file with all your orders on and the system used to do all the ork for you. However, I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it's worth looking in to:-)

Personally, I certainly wouldn't be relying on eBay to take control of important issues such as postage labels as there's always glitches, as you've unfortunately found out...............