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Selling restriction frustrations
I have had a seller restriction placed on my account and wanted to see if others have encountered this issue. I started using ebay in earnest to sell sports and non-sport cards about a year ago. I have a collection of over 20k cars and wanted to maintain around 300-400 open sales on ebay while using other mediums to sell or keep.
My seller rating is 100% with ~200 positive feedback for ~500 items sold. I started to receive emails that my seller performance dropped below ebay’s standards and they placed a selling restriction on my acccount. The driver is due to % of listing errors and it takes 1 year to go error free and get back above their threshold for restriction to be removed.
The reason is due to oversells (9 in total) where I promptly reimburse and explained to the the buyer to all their satisfaction. I was getting frustrated as I tried to understand root cause and ebay didnt make it easy to identify duplicates. I finally figured out the gap in ebays mobile app search feature and reported it verbally and via writing to ebay customer service.
My daughter and son help me post and we all used the same steps and given not always knowing where each left off on posting we would search the posted inventory first before posting. Here is where I finally figured out ebay’s gap in its search algorithm. To search for other postings we would go to the seller’s dashboard on the iphone app. We select our inventory and use the magnifying glass to search. If found we didn’t relist but if it returns “item not found†we proceed to post.
This is where ebay has a gap in its search capability versus the website. It appears ebay’s search requires full text search to find the item instead of keystring search to return anything with a partial description. For example, I have a Pokemon card listing with name “Sabrina’s Gengarâ€. If I search for “Sabrina’s†it would state listing not found leading one of us to proceed with listing it a second time. I discovered the search feature in the mobile seller dashboard requires one to type an exact match “Sabrina’s Gengar†for it to be recognized and avoid duplicate submission. On the website and subsequent listing searcy I can just put in “Sabrina’s†and it will list everything on ebay in the category I’m in that contains the word string.
Due to the selling restriction I proceeded to unlist many of my postings to get below my limit only to find out a second bug where the listing of items I can post in a month noted on my seller’s dashboard is not the same as the restriction that has been placed on my account- another defect in ebay’s offering.
Once we figured this out we changed our process to avoid duplicate posting and to the best of our ability deleted all other duplicates. Since ebay hadn’t restricted our account and it has been afew months error free I ignored only to have the issue arise again that led them to fully restrict my account.
I attempted to appeal given what I deem to be technology gaps and a bit of lack of empathy for a seller (and buyer) who had no client complaints yet this isnt factored into their binary logic for selling restrictions. For those I refunded within 24 hours of the oversells, they completely understood and didnt ding me on my rating.
Telephone conversations and emails led to
different ebay level 1 agents citings ebays policies, noting nothing can be done post 90 days, and one rep acknowledging the bug/gap and suggested I use the website since the mobile app is more buggy. Not too client friendly. I had different agents responding to my continued chain of email appeals with different canned messages with links on the selling restriction guidelines. Not helpful!
Super frustrating that common sense/empathy doesn’t prevail. There are other bugs that I came across with their sellling restrictions but I won’t get into them here. I have requested to have someone in management call me to explain and hopefully overide the level 1 agents responses only to no avail.
Posting here to see if I am alone or if perhaps others have ran into this issue.
