Ep 202 || Industrial Musicals: An Unusual Collecting Niche

[podcast_team]

Steve Young, former staff writer for the David Letterman show, talks about how a regular bit on the show led to his passion for collecting certain rare and unusual vinyl LPs; how eBay helped him fulfill that passion; and how it all resulted in a Netflix documentary. And Brian and Griff answer questions about whether or not eBay is actually blocking listings of non-compliant B2C eBay Sellers from showing up for buyers located in Germany, and a question about the consequences of a seller canceling post purchase for a specific reason.

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Industrial Musicals website
Bathtubs Over Broadway on Netflix
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Brian: I'm Brian.

Griff: I'm Griff. And this is the eBay for Business Podcast, your source for the information, the inspiration and whatever you need to help you start manage and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 202!

Brian: 202. Almost room 222.

Griff: Ah, with Karen Valentine.

Brian: Yes.

Griff: Yeah. I had lunch with her once.

Brian: You did?

Griff: Yes.

Brian: Wow.

Griff: Yeah. Nice lady. I wonder what ever happened to her?

Brian: I don't know. Someone could Google it, let us know. Maybe we'll send 'em a mug.

Griff: You will send a mug for someone who breathes. If you've taken a breath, here's a mug.

Brian: If you come into San Jose office, I'll give you a mug.

Griff: Right. We just had a guest in that's in a future episode that we recorded. We like it when we have people in studio.

Brian: That's nice.

Griff: Yeah, I think so. Our guest this week, unfortunately could not be in studio, but, he's an interesting guy. I recorded his conversation earlier this week, or if you're listening last week and, uh, he's a buyer and occasionally a seller with a very interesting history and in collecting passion, his name is Steve young.

Brian: Not the quarterback.

Griff: Not the quarterback. No. And before we get to that, Brian, is there any news this week?

Brian: We do have a couple items this week. First up, let's talk about eBay Open.

Griff: Let's.

Brian: You know, that registration opened last week.

Griff: I did.

Brian: And although space for the online event is still open the eBay Open live studio events in New York City, Los Angeles and Austin are now officially sold out.

Griff: Oh, you snooze you'll lose.

Brian: You do. But some of our sellers who do meetups around the country are also gonna have some watch parties for those Fridays. So look for those on the Seller Events page.

Griff: Right and that's community.ebay.com Seller Events tab. Once you're on the page, you can search for events. The upcoming ones will show up right there. So you may find an event in your area that although it's not one of the eBay events, you can still share the experience with sellers.

Brian: Yes, definitely. And also in the news, the 2022 Fall Seller Check-In event happens this week. Register now and join us live Thursday, August 4th at 1:00 PM Pacific time to hear eBay leaders and e-commerce experts share news about eBay Open, Holiday predictions and insights on Gen Z. You can find the event registration page link by going to the events tab at community.ebay.com, then scroll down to the link for the Fall Seller Check-in.

Griff: We do recommend that if you've never attended one of these, it's pretty easy and you can get a lot of insights. I'm curious to know what they're gonna talk about with Gen Z.

Brian: Yeah, me too. And I really encourage sellers to go to these events. It's free. You can listen in, and there's a wealth of information that comes from our leadership and others.

Griff: You can ask questions as well.

Brian: You can. Yes. And there's a team that's answering questions. So it's not just the folks that are presenting, but there are folks from our customer support organization and others that can address questions. So if you've never gone, community.ebay.com and click on the Events tab and register for the Seller Checkin.

Griff: There's a little widget that you can click on on that page. Scroll down towards the bottom. You'll see it.

Brian: So those were our news items.

Griff: Thank you, Brian. It's time to talk to our guest.

Griff: Our guest this week is a former writer for The Late Show with David Letterman. Steve Young's passion for the industrial musical is the focus of a book coauthored with colleague Sport Murphy, and it's titled Everything's Coming Up Profits, The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. Steve is also the focus of a Netflix documentary titled Bathtubs Over Broadway, which follows him as he searches for recordings and artifacts. Many of which he has found on eBay. Welcome Steve.

Steve: Hey Griff. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Griff: I'm really grateful that you agreed to be on our podcast.

Brian: Well, it's a topic I love to talk about these bizarre recordings that I stumbled upon. And as it happens, eBay turned out to be the perfect mechanism at the right time in history to really help my collecting take off and soar. And I certainly wouldn't be anywhere like where I am without eBay buying and now proud to say also selling. I've turned my expertise into being able to buy low and sell high occasionally.

Griff: You've become one of us. Steve, normally we start off on the podcast asking our guests how they get started on eBay, but I have to start with another question. What is an industrial musical?

Steve: That is a very fair question. Industrial musicals are Broadway type musical shows often extremely elaborate, full casts, orchestra, props, costumes, a story, but they were created for company conventions and sales meetings. There might be a marquee at Radio City Musical that's a little bit cryptic. It just says welcome Ford tractor dealers. And if you went up to the ticket office and said, oh, can I see this one? No, if you're not a Ford tractor dealer, you can't go in. But inside there are thousands of Ford tractor personnel, and they sit down and there's a mind bending slick and professional and tuneful musical about the triumphs and tragedies of being a Ford tractor dealer. And just maybe if things went really well, the company would be excited enough to press a souvenir record album, private pressing, never in stores, just given out within the company. And so if you multiply this by thousands of companies over several decades, you have a enormous yet almost completely off the grid, hidden secret form of show business, which I discovered quite accidentally.

Griff: What do you mean accidentally?

Steve: I spent many years as a writer on the Letterman show, as you mentioned at the outset and early on in my tenure there, the head writer said, well, we do a bit called Dave's Record Collection. It's Dave Letterman holding up real, but really strange and unintentionally funny record albums. And we hear a sample and then Dave's got a funny remark and we do eight or 10 of them. And it's a desk piece. It's a comedy bit, but it's real. And, maybe you can be the guy who will go out and find the records, cuz we need somebody to go find records. I started looking through used record stores in New York City, thrift shops, finding whatever we could get. Early on had been a lot of the celebrities who should not have been singing, who were singing like William Shatner, that was a good one. Leonard Nemoy. For some reason, the star Trek guys thought they were gonna be singers. So we ran through this bad celebrity singers and then it was a lot of teach your parakeet to talk and learn to touch type and take dictation. But I started finding the first few outlier examples of something that I had no idea what I was finding. And I'll show you a couple here.

Griff: Diesel Dazzle.

Steve: Yes. An entire musical about selling and servicing diesel engines put on by, uh, the Detroit Diesel Engine division of General Motors in 1966.

Griff: Can you hold that up again?

Steve: Oh, you don't need to ask me twice. Yeah. Diesel Dazzle. It's on the face of it, obviously it's off the charts absurd. Like for a comedy writer looking for grist for the comedy mill. Oh my God. We're three quarters of the way there. Before you even put the needle on the record, just because conceptually a musical about selling and servicing diesel engines. Oh my God! This is a gift from the comedy gods. This is, American Standard commissioned a musical called The Bathrooms Are Coming.

Griff: Oh geez.

Steve: About the new line of plumbing fixtures, 1969, two shows Vegas and Atlanta for Plumbing Fixture Distributors. Again, not the public. You could not go see The Bathrooms Are Coming unless you were high up in the plumbing industry. This is just melting my head. I kept finding them though. My Insurance Man, Continental Insurance, a musical about how to be a better insurance salesman. I thought, oh my God, this is fantastic. But what blew my mind was not all of them were great, but like those three that I just held up, I could not get the songs out of my head.

Griff: Oh dear.

Steve: We'd make a joke on the show and it'd be weeks later. And I'm still, why am I singing that diesel engine song? Why am I excited about insurance sales? There's some magnetic quality to this. I thought there is some genius at work here who were these people who made this stuff? That seems way better than it should have been. How can I find more first of all, and that's where eBay started to come in, of course, but also who were the people who wrote these things and performed in them. And that's kind of the arc of bathtubs Over Broadway. The documentary,

Griff: Some of these shows were written by people who would go on to actually become famous as Broadway writers.

Steve: That is absolutely true. It was a terrific training ground for people who were on their way up in the musical theater world. You could wait tables, you could drive a cab according to Hal Lindon. Or if you hit the jackpot, you might do the new Buick show or the Kodak show or whatever. And you made big money and were treated very well. First Class accommodations at whatever resort they flew you to. And it was hard work. You had to learn this stuff and you had to learn it fast and get it right. And pivot. If they changed the specifications of the two door a different V8 at the last minute, you had to be ready to go with the punches, but it could be a terrific world. People made more money doing industrials than they did at a mid-range actual Broadway position. And I grew up knowing really nothing about Broadway so when I started finding these records and some of them had credits on the back and I just didn't know what I was looking at. It turned out John Candor and Fred Ebb, they did a General Electric show. It only came to my attention much later that they had written Cabaret and Chicago. I had a Ford tractor record, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bach did not ring any bells for me. And a friend of mine went, oh my God, do do, do, do you know who those guys are? No. They wrote Fiddler on the Roof! So this was a huge training ground for people, not all of whom vaulted to the A-list, but many of whom did and performers also. In the movie I interviewed Cheeta Rivera, Martin Short people who came out of their early like, alright, I'm in college and I'm graduating. And I want to go into being a musical theater performer, or a dancer or a singer, whatever. If you're, if you're smart, you could get in the side door with industrials and you networked and you proved that you had the stuff and you sharpened your craft and you were ready to go when the big leagues called.

Griff: Is this a dead art? Are they still making industrial musicals?

Steve: There are many fewer now I, it was a huge trend like from the really took off in the mid fifties, companies kind of, it dawned on them. You know, we could take the form of My Fair Lady or South Pacific or whatever, and pay a lot of money to good, smart, talented people and have them make us a show. That's got all those same elements. Cause at the time in the fifties, especially mainstream middle class, American entertainment absolutely included all these Broadway musicals. I don't know how many millions and millions of copies of the soundtrack albums of My Fair Lady or Oklahoma or whatever we're in every middle class house in America.

Griff: So you started looking for these records when you discovered them, where are we talking in the eighties?

Steve: Uh, no mid nineties I think is when it dawned on me after I had like a half a dozen of them. Gee, how many of these are there? Could there be 10? What if there were 12?

Griff: And you're located, I'm assuming in Manhattan at this point in New York and you're going to record stores.

Steve: Yes. And then there started to be record shows and record fairs. I thought, okay, well I'm still kind of doing this for the Letterman Show, but now it had tipped over more like, I don't care if the Fluorescent Light Fixture Musical doesn't get on the Letterman Show. I want it for myself. So yes had a dual mandate after a while and eventually we didn't do record collection anymore, but this was now my own mission in life to see what was out there. Network with record dealers, other collectors, just say, Hey, I'm looking for this weird, super bizarre obscure sub genre. If you ever see anything like this, let me know, hand out want lists, things like that. But it was right about at that time when I was starting to take it a little more seriously, that I started hearing about this new thing called eBay.

Griff: Ah, here we go.

Steve: Yes. I first joined eBay in late 97. So it had been around two years for what, two, two years I heard about this thing and I started looking at it and I'm sure it had taken enormous leaps already by late 97. Of course it's laughable now to think how crude and undifferentiated so much of it was. So I'm looking for an unbelievably arcane kind of record that was pressed in minuscule quantities, never for sale in stores. Most people have never heard of any of the titles or the genre. It is the ultimate needle in a haystack to go on eBay in 1997. I don't know if there were searching by keywords yet even? I just remembered scrolling through thousands of records just listed. And it was like the electronic version of being in a thrift shop and you're at a bin and you're just trying to get through stuff.

Griff: Hours and hours and hours.

Steve: Yes, but it paid off even early on. I have some of the first ones that I ever found and it would be so exciting because they were ones you've never heard of before, cuz no one knows what's out there. 1966, Coca-Cola Route Salesman's Convention. I thought this is perfect. This is exactly what I'm looking for. And I think I had to stay up till 3:00 AM to watch the end of the auction. I don't know how many people were bidding on it. I probably may have paid over a hundred dollars for it, but I was very excited.

Griff: You weren't the only person interested in these at the time then?

Steve: Some of these records have what I would call cross collectability. There were vanishingly few people who looked for them for the reasons I was looking for them. Nobody with only one or two exceptions cared about the bizarre, hidden world of corporate musicals. But Coca-Cola collectors are very well organized and very numerous and often deep pocketed and somebody would see this and say, now that's a strange Coke item. I gotta have that to add to my 10,000 item collection museum in my basement. So sometimes you fight with people about that. The next item I found on eBay was kind of the ultimate version of that.

Griff: Once in a lifetime. Oh no.

Steve: Can you read that?

Griff: Yes. It's the Edsel Dealer Announcement Show. Oh dear.

Steve: Yes.

Griff: So an album celebrating one of the worst disasters when it came to marketing in history.

Steve: Right. This is a whole snapshot of a mid-century business adventure that failed. But as I'll just say, as a collectible Edsel people, they know exactly what they want. They know pretty much, much what's out there. There were people who knew about this record before I ever heard about it or whatever. They wanna have one to prop on their 1958 citation convertible to bring to the auto show and win a trophy.

Griff: You had to pay dearly for this. I'm assuming.

Steve: Yeah. This one I think was at least a couple hundred dollars and it was a fist fight down to the last minute. It's a good record. I mean we, when I say we, the five people in the world who care about the details, I don't think we yet know who wrote it or who was in it. Sometimes that's a detective job in itself to piece together clues about who worked on an uncredited record and what you can find out. But the songs are really pretty good and it's so heartbreaking in a way cuz it's oh, there's unlimited opportunity. And an opportunity only comes once in a lifetime with such a perfect storm, we got everything lined up. We're gonna be the happiest people in the world. It's like "our Edsel Dealership is open today. We're ready for business and a great big way!" ( singing) The sky was the limit in August of 57 when nothing had actually gone down yet. And then I like to imagine that in the fall of 59, when they finally shut down the Edsel division, I like to think of a bitter Edsel dealer sitting in his darkened office, listening to this record one last time, drinking whiskey straight from the bottle.

Griff: It's a great vision. A great picture.

Steve: I'm kind of a car buff anyway. So I was pretty well up on the Edsel story, but there's so many deep dives you can take into really learning about the ins and outs of cultural history and business history and the history of entertainment. Just like I was saying that musicals were broadly a middle class acceptable thing. And then 20 years later you had a new generation of people coming into the workforce. Salesman who liked Led Zeppelin and they didn't care about Hello Dolly or My Fair Lady. And that was another reason that things started to slowly slide down to the finish line for industrials. You do see some disco themed sales meeting records and musicals in the late seventies and more and more rock trying to get in by the eighties. Very iffy whether a corporation can convincingly rock out at a sales meeting. But yeah, it's an interesting way to track a lot of historic trends.

Griff: I wanted to change focus a little bit because we've talked a lot about buying and our audience is primarily sellers and a lot of them source product. And I can tell you one of the things they're now writing on their list is okay, look for LPs. That might be industrial musical.

Steve: Yeah, I'm shooting myself in the foot.

Griff: Well, not necessarily cuz this, this is a good way for people to not pass these up when they see them in thrift stores and in yard sales, when they do come up, however rare, cuz they're gonna resell them on eBay so that you Steve can add to your collection.

Steve: And I've got my hundreds of saved searches with extremely arcane phrases and titles that I'm not gonna tell people what they are. But yes, the more that comes out of America's closets, basements, ATS, thrift shops, the better. And that was I think really what amazed me when I realized the scope of eBay. I also had collected art deco era cameras before I got into records.

Griff: Oh I have a few of those on my show beyond just Kodak. Kodak made lots, lots of different, great ones.

Steve: Yeah. But there were like the super rare, this was produced as a souvenir from the 33 World's Fair in Chicago.

Griff: Yeah. I've seen only a few of those in my travels.

Brian: Yeah. You're not gonna see many of those. This one I believe I did get on eBay. So there you go. But as a person wandering around to flea markets and antique shops doing the legwork, you might go your entire life and never see one of those. But eBay suddenly I think the economists talk about removing friction from the marketplace and suddenly the thing you'd look for all your life or it had been rumored and you could never find, you might have the wherewithal now to say, well, there are three of them. How am I gonna choose?

Griff: The lowest price.

Steve: Yes. Or the best conditioner, whatever. Or maybe I'll buy the extra one and sell it to my friend. Who's not on eBay and, and pay for my collecting habit. That's what I try to do. Now. A guy recently, this wasn't on eBay. Although I met him by buying something else on eBay from him, he sold me a lot of, I think, five records, one of which I'm keeping cuz it was one I didn't have the other four. I'm now gonna put on eBay pretty soon because I'm the bathtubs Over Broadway guy. And I have a sort of credibility and I write up my descriptions of why these records are cool and awesome and rare and why this is a significant one and it seems to work.

Griff: You're creating your own competition, Steve!

Steve: That's right. But at this point between the book coming out and then the documentary, I don't lose sleep about. If I get anything else now, the story has been told. So magnificently by Bathtubs Over Broadway, which by the way I am in, but I'm not the filmmaker. It was made and was directed by Dava Whisenant a wonderful filmmaker who I met when she was an editor at The Letterman Show. And she saw even more potential in this story than I did cuz it turned into this wonderful journey of how do people connect with each other. And how do you decide what is the meaning of what you've done with your career and what is the intersection between art and business? All these rather profound universal questions that came outta this super weird kind of record collecting. But eBay was a blessing and it continues to be. Early on I was buying this stuff for like $4. It was costing me more for the shipping than for the record. That doesn't happen too often anymore. There is more information out there about, oh yeah, there was that movie about this record. Oh maybe this is valuable. And then you have the people who go overboard and they've got one of these and they decide it's worth $5,000.

Griff: Oh right. Good luck.

Steve: Yeah. It's gonna sit on eBay for the rest of our lives. People are gonna say how about that? And they're gonna look at it and no one's gonna buy it. But it's fascinating to watch the market at work, trying to establish values. And uh, I've done fine with that over the years. But if I never found another record, I'd be okay because I have a lot and my friends have some that I don't have, but we all dub copies for each other of whatever we find. And that's the other thing about it, the collecting world and I'm sure many eBay aficionados would say the same thing. Yes. There's a certain amount of, oh I hope I find this before so and so, but I also then hope that they'll get one too and that we'll swap information about what else we're finding. And it's fun to have people just to celebrate with when one of you finds something.

Griff: It's a community.

Steve: Yes.

Griff: Exactly. Are you selling currently on eBay?

Steve: I don't have any listings up right now. I have a dozen or two records that I'm probably list probably sometime in August or September. I'm gonna be traveling for a bit and I wanna be home for a stretch so I can run to the post office every nine hours. But yeah. It's a fun hobby it's uh, and I know some people scale it all the way up to their profession to be professional sellers on eBay. I would be surprised if I can go all that way with this because for all my expertise in finding them now they are scarce. There are many records in my collection that are the single known copy that's ever been found of a record. Like, this one I pulled off eBay, I don't know, must have been 18 or 20 years ago. This is a division of DuPont kind of lucite paint and probably paid $9 for it or something. But no one has ever seen another copy.

Griff: That's incredible.

Steve: There's quite a few that either I or another collector have that. Nope. So far that's the one copy apparently that was not immediately thrown away by its recipient after the convention. And it's just so dicey. What will ever actually bubble up to the surface in a way that a collector might find

Griff: With the apparent dearth of these being available to people, have you considered making the music more available so that people can familiarize themselves with the content which is really hard to do have that ever, uh, been something you've considered?

Steve: Well, there are a few things available now, if people go to industrial musicals.com, we have some sample greatest hits that are just streaming on the site. And there are also links to where we have compilations best of the fifties, sixties, and seventies that you can download from Amazon and iTunes. We also, when Bathtubs Over Broadway came out, we did a wonderful soundtrack album, which I think there's 32 tracks and it's digital. You can get that on all your digital platforms or whatever, but we also did a gorgeous two record set vinyl edition colored vinyl, 12 page liner notebook lit with lots of photos. That to me is amazing because it's brought it full circle. It started from like 1993 when I found the first one of these vinyl albums and thought, what the heck is this to more than 20 years later, the phenomenon has asserted itself enough to say, Nope, we're gonna put out this movie soundtrack on vinyl. There are different ways for yes people to get a lot of the greatest hits.

Griff: I don't have much vinyl left over the years at all. I was a child of the sixties and seventies. It's all gone, but I have the Ethel Merman disco album. One of the most bizarre records ever.

Steve: That's a good stalwart of Dave's record collection.

Griff: Yes. And the other one was Way Out West , Mae West singing rock and roll in the sixties, which is even more bizarre.

Steve: Yeah. I'm familiar with that. Those are the kinds of records that Dave Letterman himself and a couple other early staffers had. And they said, you know, I have this weird record. Sebastian Cabot reads the lyrics of Bob Dylan or, Robert Mitchum sings Calypso. Like a couple of writers and Letterman himself had odds and ends of extremely strange vinyl. And that was the Genesis of the piece. You know, if we found a few more weird records, we could do a bit on the show. So it started out quite honestly, and then became in later years a struggle to keep finding enough good new material. But I will say that when the book came out, Dave Letterman had me on the show as a guest three times, he enjoyed not only the weird records and this book came out and it was beautiful, but this had grown out of his own show and not many things blossomed out to become their own phenomenon quite that way. And when Dava said she wanted to make this documentary, we approached Dave Letterman and he not only gave us a very nice donation when we had no money, but he became an executive producer of the movie, put his stamp of this is something I believe in, which was a huge help as we were trying to raise more money and get more momentum. He's in the movie, I interview him, which not many people get to do. From the humble beginnings of Dave's record collection he took great pride and pleasure in seeing how something had just organically developed and unrolled due to my curiosity.

Griff: And pasion.

Steve: Passion and respect, and even love people that you see me meeting in Bathtubs Over Broadway are part of my weird cosmic family now.

Griff: Well, Steve, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I'm going to put links to everything that you mentioned.

Steve: And I will mention, even though the book is now sadly out of print, and I don't know when it will be printed again, I do have a stash of a few dozen copies and I sell them privately to people who are interested eBay, secondary market on the book shows that you might be paying three figures for a copy. I won't make you do that. so if anyone's interested.

Griff: Can I have a copy? I forgot to ask!

Steve: uh, we'll work something out.

Griff: Thanks Steve. Thanks again. And continued success with your, your search and your selling of all these items, including the industrial musicals. And thank you for joining us today.

Steve: My pleasure, and thank you so much for allowing me to tell my twisted yet beautiful collecting story that eBay is such a central part of.

Griff: Steve young is a former writer for The Late Show with David Letterman and a buyer and a seller on eBay will put links up to everything we mentioned. We'll also put a link up. If we can, to the Netflix documentary title Bathtubs Over Broadway,

Brian: You got questions?

Griff: We've got answers. I hope we do trust me. We have answers. And this week we have a few new questions to answer Brian, including one that was actually sent to my work email address and not podcast@ebay.com.

Brian: Does that count?

Griff: It counts. And especially if the person who sends it tells you they're gonna post it, their response in their Facebook group with 9,000 users.

Brian: Yes. Let's do that.

Griff: Yeah, we will. And it asks a very interesting question that I am pretty certain, our listener will want to hear. Why don't you read the first part, Brian, and then you can, we will discuss it as we go along.

Brian: Okay. Well, here it is Griff. I am the moderator of Flipping Hippo's reseller pod on Facebook. Recently, I got an email from eBay stating that I was trying to circumvent the defect process in cancellations, along with a warning that said in effect not to do it again, or I would be suspended. But no details on what listing or what I did wrong. I was perplexed as to what I did wrong. So I messaged eBay for Business on Facebook, and they told me that on a recent sale, I noticed my description was unclear on something. So I messaged a buyer, clarified a detail about the item and asked the buyer what they wanted to do, given the clarified information. She didn't tell you what exactly needed clarifying her description.

Griff: No, she didn't, but it had to have been significant. Keep reading.

Brian: The buyer said cancel. So I canceled choosing buyer requested cancellation. The eBay for Business rep said that despite the buyer's willingness to cancel, it should have been canceled for out of stock because it was me that started the conversation, not the buyer. I believe, and others have been advised otherwise. Then an agreement is an agreement and it's covered if it's in the messages, sellers with much more volume chimed in claiming they message buyers for permission all the time with zero repercussions. And they were shocked, tiny seller like me would be cracked down on and not them. That just led to a whole lot of lack of clarity and no clear, consistent answer. Can you please tell us all officially if obtaining buyer permission to cancel justifies a buyer request cancellation or not, your answer will be posted to about 9,000 sellers. Thanks princess Esmeralda. eBay user name is Sweet Emeralds. Interesting. What should we tell Esmeralda?

Griff: Well, so Esmeralda sent this to me earlier the past week, and I responded to her pretty soon afterwards with this. Hi, Esmeralda. Sorry to hear this happened. It's happened to me a few times in the past 10 years, where I had to contact a buyer post purchase to alert them to a mistake I made in the description. One time a buyer said it didn't matter. And to just ship the item, but the other times the buyer either canceled the order, or if their window for canceling had closed, they asked me to cancel. But in every one of those situations, my account was indeed impacted with the defect and rightfully so, I may add.

Brian: I would agree.

Griff: The policy that the CS rep on the Facebook page referred to is called the Order Cancellation Policy.

Brian: And we'll put a link to that help page in the episode, 202 transcript, it says a seller can cancel an order. If the buyer asks to cancel the order and they haven't shipped the item yet, the buyer hasn't paid within the time allowed the buyer used the wrong shipping address when they completed their purchase. The item is out of stock. This will result in a transaction defect because you could not fulfill the item that the buyer purchased. The transaction is considered a stockout.

Griff: And Brian's right. I know that the buyer asked you to cancel. So technically it seems to you in your mind that it's a buyer cancellation, but they asked you to cancel because they had to do so based on the information you provided post purchase, and because the one hour window for the buyer to issue the cancellation had already closed.

Brian: So when a seller contacts, a buyer after a purchase is made, tell the buyer something about the listing or the item or the description. And the result is the buyer cancels the order. This is in fact, a Seller Initiated Cancellation. your message to them resulted in their not wanting the item. To look at it another way. Had you not contacted the buyer, you would've most likely risked a return based on item not described.

Griff: Exactly. So as me to the bottom line is if a seller has to correct or alter an item description after the buyer has purchased that item, they have to bear responsibility. If the buyer then cancels based on that information or asks the seller to cancel the purchase because of that information,

Brian: And Esmeralda, you really should consider the situation from the buyer's end. They purchased an item based on your description and photos, you then contacted the buyer post purchased but before you shipped the item to let them know about something in, in your description, that was either missing or inaccurate.

Griff: Yeah. She didn't really say what it was. I'd be curious to know, but we don't have that information.

Brian: Whatever it was, it was enough for the buyer to decide they didn't want that item. The buyer then decided to cancel a listing. Had your description been accurate prior to the buyer's purchase? The buyer would not have canceled the order.

Griff: Exactly. That's the crux here. The cancellation was not due to a change of heart on the part of the buyer. It was due to the description, either missing information or having inaccurate information. And unfortunately that's on you as the seller. It's not on the buyer.

Steve: But I wanna say that Esmeralda, you definitely did the right thing in alerting the buyer.

Griff: Yeah, I think so too. I assume whatever was wrong with, with the description was inadvertent. I know. I, it wasn't, it's not intentional. It's just, you know...

Brian: People make mistakes.

Griff: Exactly. And in this case, I understand why this resulted in a defect against your account. It's not the answer you hoped to hear. I'm sure. But I have to say the action taken by the Customer Support Team was the correct one.

Brian: Yep. I agree. And I also understand their decision.

Griff: So Esmeralda, the correct response to share with your followers is this. If a seller discovers information about the item that requires the seller to contact the buyer post purchase, to alert the buyer about the discovery, and that can be anything like the item is lost, broken, or the description wasn't accurate. And the result of giving that information is the buyer then asked to cancel the order or cancels it themselves if there's time to do so. This will be considered by eBay, a seller initiated cancellation for stockout, and it will result in a defect.

Brian: I wonder if Esmeralda has posted your response to her group yet?

Griff: I have no idea. I mean, I hope she has, if only to set the record straight for all of her followers regarding a seller cancellation, so that's that issue.

Brian: Yeah. I agree. I think our Customer Support Group gave the right response and I think your guidance to her is right on.

Griff: And finally, this week we have two short questions about the new German Packaging Act. Hey guys, great podcast. Thanks for all the info. I'm think I'm going to drop Germany from my shipping list as you described. However, when I read the original email message about this, I assume that eBay was gonna cut me off from Germany automatically, but I just got an order for Germany through GSP. So what happens if I send this one little package without being in the Lucid system? What is the risk analysis I'm looking at? I'll definitely be shutting it down, going forward. Thanks Bob. I don't know what the risk analysis is. I think according with my conversations with the shipping team, the risk is that the package will be refused and sent back to you. I don't think that they're gonna fine you necessarily, but you could have your package confiscated or sent back. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is I have, well, I'll talk about it after you read the second question, but there is information to share on this.

Brian: OK. So you're the expert, but I have a question about that first one then.

Griff: What is it? Tell me now.

Brian: So there's a purchase made the, buyer's expecting an item. So what's the guidance to,Bob is to not ship the item?

Griff: Well, no, I would ship it. Okay. Yeah. And if something goes wrong and it gets returned back to the seller, then there is a path you can explain, but I definitely would ship it.

Brian: Christina also sent in a question about this, the act. Hello Griff. I have a question about the German Packaging Act. I sell internationally and use eBay International Standard Delivery. The eBay policy states eBay has a legal obligation to ensure that all our B2C sellers are compliant. If you do not take the necessary steps by the deadline, we will be legally required to restrict your selling privileges for the German market. I did not register in Lucid to be compliant with the act. So I was under the impression that buyers from Germany won't be able to buy from me. However, I got several Best Offers on several items from a buyer in Germany today. Could you please tell me why the buyer was able to send me the offer since I'm not registered in the Lucid? What should I do if a buyer from Germany order something, should I ship the order or cancel it? I am aware I can exclude Germany in my business policies, but I always have active offers. So I'm not able to do that all at once, Christina.

Griff: So I got some confirmation back from the Shipping Team and I apologize that this was confusing. But according to them, we are not automatically blocking non Lucid B2C sellers listings from appearing in front of buyers. Located in Germany. My advice would be to both Bob and Christina, ship the packages or not, you know, you can refuse the offers and you could just, you know, decline them until they expire. And then follow the instructions in the episode, 198 episode of the podcast, where we discuss how to quickly and safely and effectively restrict your listings to buyers that are located in Germany. Note that I'm not saying German buyers, because it is a matter of where the buyers are located. We're not blocking them. If you want to be in compliance, you wanna go through those steps to block your listings from appearing to buyers located in Germany, or you can register If you believe your business is sufficient enough to justify it, you can register with Lucid, the Lucid database. And once you have a lucid number, then you have to go to Lizenzero, and then register with them. And, and there's a yearly fee of about 40 bucks. It's your decision. I think we may have possibly used unintentionally misleading information about blocking. Cause I did hear back from that team and we are not blocking listings. You gotta do either or if you wanna be in compliance.

Brian: This is kinda like another question or, and it's maybe even an opportunity for sellers. We have two sellers within the last week who've gotten offers or purchases from Germany where they didn't want pay the $40 and be compliant with the new German regulations. To me, it speaks of boy, if you're a seller and you're okay, paying that $40, you may see more German eyeballs on your listings because for every seller that opts out, that means there's less competition for you.

Griff: Exactly. And we've also seen, I've seen, I've talked to sellers in the last month who say, oh yeah, I've registered. I make way too many sales in Germany to quibble over a 40 registration fee. And you don't have to worry about it after that. So those are our questions this week.

Brian: Interesting couple, a couple of 'em and probably, you know, we might get some additional questions back from people on our responses to both those questions.

Griff: I hope we do, cuz we can always use the content.

Brian: Yeah. And if you want us to answer your eBay questions, please call it in at (888) 723-4630 or (888) 723-4630.

Griff: And don't forget to leave your shipping address on the message. There's an eBay for Business Podcast mug in it for you. If we use your question in an upcoming episode.

Brian: You're not a call on the phone person. You say no problem. You can always email us at podcast@ebay.com, that's podcast@ebay.com.

Griff: And now it's time for your three point podcast checklist.

Brian: Check the Announcement Board at ebay.com/announcements for up to date news every day. And for information about eBay Open.

Griff: Number two, follow the instructions in episode 198 to either register with Lucid or to block your listings from appearing to buyers located in Germany.

Brian: Need to review anything in this episode, it's easy. Just call Griff.

Griff: No, no, no!

Brian: I'm kidding. Check the transcript for this and all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and to find the links we referenced during the episode.

Griff: On our next episode, we're gonna talk with eBay Product Team Manager, Lucan MCRandall about using Terra Peak as a product sourcing guide.

Brian: We'd like to, again, thank our guest this week. Steve Young.

Griff: The eBay for Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.