Managed payments making my life miserable yet again.

[silvervintagephoto]

So yet another complaint about the awful implementation of managed Payments:

I'm a small seller and had a buyer request a return on a highish ($1k) value item yesterday, due to the fact that it apparently stopped working about a week after he purchased it. OK, unfortunate, but it comes with the territory of being an eBay seller, and I have no reason to think it's a false return. So far, so good.

So eBay, puts a hold on $1k in funds from my payouts. I mostly sell a few items a week in the $50-$200 range and ship within a day, so the amount of cash in my pending payouts is typically well below $1k, so now I am in negative territory by several hundred dollars.

In the meantime, I receive four smaller orders. I can't buy labels from my now-negative pending payouts balance, so I attempt to use Paypal to pay for them through the shipping page. The payment fails with an ambiguous error message. I check my Paypal settings on-site and on Paypal.com, and everything is correct and logged in, so I contact CS for a callback. Eventually "Ed" calls me back and walks me through a number of steps, including trying different browsers, updating my Paypal account information, etc., to no avail. Eventually "Ed" lets slip "well, there's an issue with the payment agreement between Paypal and eBay."

Now whether he means this is something company-wide, or is trying to poorly explain an issue that only affects my account, I don't know. But the long and the short of it is that eBay is actively interfering with my ability to ship items sold on their own site in a timely manner, potentially affecting my seller rating and ticking off both me and my customers!

When Paypal was still managing my payments, I could instantly add funds to my account from my bank if I had a shortfall (did I mention that despite having a linked bank account, eBay won't let me do this or even pay for labels from this account?).  Further, since I was an established seller with a good track record of processing returns, they would not put holds on my funds if a case were opened.

All that has gone away with managed payments. Instead, I am treated like an untrustworthy criminal and my funds frozen any time a return is opened! It's insulting.

In the end, I had to laboriously buy labels off-site at a higher price and manually add each tracking number. So to add injury to insult, between processing the labels and waiting with the rep, I got to waste an hour and a half of my Saturday morning on a process that should have taken less than 5 minutes.

[downunder-61]

Did you try to pay the shipping with pending funds at all? I know you said it is in the negative, but surely the system is geared to allow you to do this as the 'current' buyers payments would cover it without affecting the hold for the return?

[duncanvr]

This is why I will not ever list something for $1000 nor even $500+. To many possible things can go wrong with such a sale. Sticking to under $250 with the bulk being under $100 items is the safest bet on ebay. I think it would be good if sellers could add funds to available balance when needed to cover returns even fees etc if they want to. Sorry this happened to you is there no way the return can be refunded from your bank funds? You don't want to have to keep buying labels off site.

[usmediamass]

@silvervintagephoto 

I feel your pain.  The longer you use managed payments the more you will realize how awful it is.

They will also the total amount of a sale; sale, shipping and taxes.  If it is a buyer's remorse issue you are only liable for the item price, but they hold money you spent on shipping and tax money that you never had.

ebay is aggressively trying to put sellers out of business.

The direction they have been head for the last few years in not sustainable.  

The more ebay charges, and they are creating new ways everyday, the prices go up and buyers leave.

More sellers are moving to other platforms and less new ones are not signing up. 

Sad part is, as simple as it is, ebay has proven time and time and time again, they don't care.

Cue the ebay choir........

[silvervintagephoto]

Update:

So when I spoke with Ed, he said to give them a call with the shipping totals bought off-site and they would issue a refund covering the difference between the eBay shipping discount and my actual charges. It came to a whopping 97 cents, but out of principle, I contacted CS again to request the credit, giving them the reference number Ed gave me.

The second CS rep  demanded I tell him the error message I was receiving, and I let him know that I had closed the shipping labels window since I had already bought the labels off-site and manually entered shipping info, but that it should be in the ticket I created/previously recorded call. He immediately got rude and obstructive and refused to do anything unless I gave him the error message immediately.

I had to ask to speak to his manager several times before I was finally transferred to someone else, who sounded like they were US-based (Ed sounded Filipino, the second guy Indian or Pakistani).

This manager went on to refuse to even entertain the idea of a credit for an off-site shipping purchase, despite the fact that Ed, an employee of eBay and therefore their legal agent, had made a promised me just such a refund, and I had relied on it to my detriment in making the more expensive shipping purpose. Incidentally, I do have a JD and can state with certainty that under US law, this is a legally-binding oral contract, a fact that was totally lost on "Lupe" the manager with whom I spoke. He claimed he would review the recording of the initial conversation that no refund would be forthcoming, which is how the call ended.

Now this is not even close to the first time I have been told a bald-faced lie by an eBay CS rep. Some things apparently NEVER change.

[zippymail]

I use paypal to print labels and pay with credit card on file with them.

[silvervintagephoto]

That's wha

---

@zippymail wrote:

I use paypal to print labels and pay with credit card on file with them.

---

Yeah, that's what I ended up doing, since it's how I used to do it before the Managed Payments switchover. Unfortunately the shipping info no longer autopopulates to Paypal, so everything has to be manually entered.

[mtgraves7984]

---

@silvervintagephoto wrote:

That's wha

---

@zippymail wrote:

I use paypal to print labels and pay with credit card on file with them.

---

Yeah, that's what I ended up doing, since it's how I used to do it before the Managed Payments switchover. Unfortunately the shipping info no longer autopopulates to Paypal, so everything has to be manually entered.

---

@silvervintagephoto 

I choose to pay for my shipping labels with PayPal. In my PayPal wallet, I have my attached bank account set as the 'Preferred' method of payment while shopping online. Can you not do that?

[silvervintagephoto]

---

@mtgraves7984 wrote:

---

@silvervintagephoto wrote:

That's wha

---

@zippymail wrote:

I use paypal to print labels and pay with credit card on file with them.

---

Yeah, that's what I ended up doing, since it's how I used to do it before the Managed Payments switchover. Unfortunately the shipping info no longer autopopulates to Paypal, so everything has to be manually entered.

---

@silvervintagephoto 

I choose to pay for my shipping labels with PayPal. In my PayPal wallet, I have my attached bank account set as the 'Preferred' method of payment while shopping online. Can you not do that?

---

As I clearly describe in the original post, for whatever reason, the Pay with Paypal option isn't working, even though I have a linked, valid Paypal with funds in it.

See the attached screenshot

[mtgraves7984]

@silvervintagephoto... My mistake!

I now  see... "I can't buy labels from my now-negative pending payouts balance, so I attempt to use Paypal to pay for them through the shipping page."

You knew exactly what you were doing. I've got no other ideas, unfortunately. Dang... sorry. 😣

[chapeau-noir]

---

@silvervintagephoto wrote:

That's wha

---

@zippymail wrote:

I use paypal to print labels and pay with credit card on file with them.

---

Yeah, that's what I ended up doing, since it's how I used to do it before the Managed Payments switchover. Unfortunately the shipping info no longer autopopulates to Paypal, so everything has to be manually entered.

---

@silvervintagephoto  The site has been horribly glitchy lately.

Use Pirateship - sign up for an account, link your eBay account and it will autopopulate your sales.  You can designate payment methods.  Takes no time at all to print labels that way, and it's as cheap as eBay.  It works well as a backup.

[kensgiftshop]

@silvervintagephoto 

When I bought my first label using the pending funds, I received a message saying that the agreement with Pay Pal was now canceled.

You probably need to sign the billing agreement again to pay for the labels through Pay Pal.

[vintagecraze50]

Yes that is the way they have set this system up for us. It just gets deducted from the incoming sales. I suppose they can bill for it as well at the end of the month. Seems like a rather tricky situation for them though since some folks might book on them and not pay their bill if they do not sell enough on here.

[themayqueen]

from what you've posted i think you could try setting up another payment method.

[themayqueen]

might not be any pending funds for more than one minute. depending on the payment method the buyers used.