Terrible eBay buying experience, undisclosed 40 item CART/CHECKOUT/PAYMENT limit
Does everyone here know that if you win more than 40 auctions from a single seller, or more than 50 auctions from multiple sellers, you will:
- Not see all of your items in your Shopping Cart
- Not have any visible indication on the eBay site as to the total number of items you have won
- Not be able to pay for more than 40 at a time, with no on screen message alerting you to this
- Not know which won items are newest and which are oldest
BE AWARE!
My Story:
I spent a lot, a lot of time recently bidding on more than 100 items from a Chinese seller. In the end, it turned out I won 87 of them. All auctions ended within 1 hour of each other, and all were for the same item (shame on sellers who do this, but that's another story).
Unbeknownst to me, eBay limits their Shopping Cart feature to listing a maximum of around 50 items (varies between 40-50 depending on the mood of the server). This means the page at cart.ebay.com provides no indication whatsoever if you have more than 50 items awaiting payment! What's worse, the older auctions you've won get bumped out of the cart once you reach the limit! Well, to be clear, they exist in a phantom version of your cart, only to reappear once you pay for the visible items first.
This is obviously terrible for a site as big as eBay to have such a broken Shopping Cart, but it gets worse. After thinking I won 50 items, as shown in my cart, I proceeded to the "checkout" page. There, ONLY 40 items were listed. But, you'd never know this, because there is no mention of it anywhere (although plenty of space is wasted pestering me to open an eBay credit card). So, assuming you are not the type of person to sit and count all the items on the checkout page to realize for yourself there are only 40 out of the supposed 50 (also a false number!) of items being presented there, you will proceed to pay for your order and consider it done; close out of eBay and get on with your life.
In my case, not only did that mean that I payed for less than half of the items I won from a particular seller, it meant that I paid nothing to some earlier (ending a few hours sooner) auctions that I won from a different seller! Yes, once you reach eBay-imposed item limits the OLDER items disappear from the cart. The only place you can find these items awaiting payment even exist is if you visit the ebay.com/mye/myebay/purchase page ... oh, but wait... that page only lists 25 items per page, so you have to know to start looking at the last page -- and then, you only know there are multiple pages if you scroll all the way down to the bottom and notice the page numbers.
It's an unbelievably horrible user experience: if you have more than 50 items awaiting payment, in no way or shape is this information available to you anywhere on the eBay website, unless you visit the Purchase History page, click Unpaid items, and count up each individual item yourself, clicking to advance to the next page after every 25 items.
And why am I so upset about this? Because buyers are time limited to complete the checkout process. If I pay for 40 items from once seller, not realizing that I have another 47 items from that seller and 3 items from other sellers that need payment, I can easily lose those items when the seller decides to relist them after 3 days. Furthermore, buyers are punished when this happens, by being prohibited from bidding on certain items in the future (eBay used to have a resolution and strike system to manage this, but now the system is entirely opaque).
What utter nonsense from a multi-billion-dollar eCommerce giant.
mudshark61369
·2 years ago@bo33b,
Items that you have successfully won or bought for show up in your purchase history, not in the Cart. You cannot save auctions to the cart until you have won them. The Cart only works with fixed price listings. If you add an auction or a Best Offer listing to the cart before winning it or having an offer accepted, the information is frozen there, and does not update to the correct price when you win.
You can add won auctions or accepted offers, to the Cart once you have won them, because at that point they are a fixed price listing. If you had trouble paying, for the items it is because of that. If the seller has auto pay set up for auction wins, you are charged immediately for the item, and there's no reason to add them to the cart.
https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/paying-items/shopping-cart?id=4360
You do a lot of buying from Chinese sellers many of whom most experienced ebay users would have passed on after seeing their feedback percentages. You have bought from High volume chinese sellers that have percentages of 92-94% which are terrible percentages for a high volume seller, most feel 98.6% is the cut off point. Not only that but the highest number of scams on ebay are from chinese sellers. So far you seem to have been lucky, but sooner or later you are going to get bit someplace you do not want to be bitten.
bo33b
OP2 years agoThanks mudshark for contributing, you make a valid point about Chinese sellers and indeed I have been burned before. I've been on eBay for a long time and learned not to have high expectations from certain types of sellers, and not just Chinese. eBay's policies have always protected me reasonably well.
To your point on adding items to the cart: It has always been my experience that, once an auction item is won, it automatically appears in the cart just as any BiN item would if you were to click the Add to Cart button. The only difference is that won auction items are "unremovable" from the cart, leaving you obligated to continue to the Checkout step, at your convenience. So the distinction is not relevant.
I don't think you've ever had more than 40 items in your cart at one time. The problem is the same, whether you win 40+ auctions or find 40+ BiN items and add them to the cart yourself. After the 40 item limit, expected behavior of the cart breaks down; the oldest items may disappear (definitely happens after 50+ items) and you are unable to pay for all of them in a single checkout transaction, even though there is no indication whatsoever that that is happening. You also cannot see how may items are in your cart, as the red indicator bubble overlaid on the cart icon in the eBay site header will not go past 50. You can try it yourself, just find a seller with 100 BiN listings, add all to the cart, and try to checkout (you don't have to commence payment). No modern ecommerce site should break when you are trying to place a large order.
You are right that the purchase history is available for showing all your won auctions, and that functionality works as intended even if you win 100+ auctions in a day. My complaint with purchase history is that it paginates results after 25 items, with no setting to change that (eBay previously removed the ability to select "items per page" in My Ebay history). Combined with the fact that the Cart will not count your won items if the number exceeds 50, the only way to know how many items you owe payment on is to visit each history page and count up the results yourself.
Combine all this with the fact that this is an undisclosed limitation, and you will find people like me who won a bunch of auctions scratching their heads after completing a Checkout with 40 items in their cart, thinking they have settled with the seller, then returning to eBay 10 minutes later only to find there are still 40 items in the cart from the same seller still awaiting payment. Pay those, refresh, and there are STILL 40 items in your cart awaiting payment! This is the case if you win 120 items from a single seller. What's worse, if you had also previously won items from a DIFFERENT seller, they will not appear in your cart for checkout until you have paid off all NEWER auctions from the seller who sold to you in bulk. If, like me, you closed the browser and took a long weekend holiday after (apparently) paying off you entire cart balance, only to come back and find dozens of won items went unpaid from the same earlier timeframe, well, that makes for a really bad buying experience because the sellers have likely already canceled your orders and eBay has penalized you for it.
solidguitar1961
·2 years agoI've never had the luck of selling that many items on one transaction .
bo33b
OP2 years agoYeah, no doubt! Not many buyers have an interest in bidding on that many items from a single seller in a small window of time.