Seller Payment Terms vs eBay Payment Policy (under shipping preferences>>Payment Deadline setting)
I buy and sell on Ebay. Over the past 5 years, I have purchased large quantities of individual sports cards from a large consignment seller on eBay (Greg Morris Cards (GMC)). GMC runs all listings as 7 day auctions. Their eBay terms explicitly state on every listing that they allow buyers to combine up to 40 items over a 7 day period for shipping purposes. Many consignment seller operate this way so it is not unique to GMC. So if I win 5 items on Monday, 3 items on Wednesday and 10 items on Friday, they will combine all 18 of them all into one invoice with one flat $4.95 shipping fee. I have never had an issue with this in the past.
Over the past few months, eBay has started aggressively harassing me after just a couple days to pay the seller or I risk losing my items. This never used to happen to me. On multiple occasions, I have had to close out the invoice early to avoid losing items. I used to be able to let the purchases run the entire 7 day period and then pay the invoice in full with no issues at all. There has been 2 separate occasions where eBay has restricted me from bidding with GMC cards at the 4 day mark because I had unpaid items in my cart...even though the seller explicitly allows 7 day terms. This caused me to miss some specific items I was interested in to complete some sets.
After digging into my own seller account, I determined there is a setting under Site Preferences >> Shipping Preferences >> Allow Invoice Requests >> Edit >> Payment Deadline where the seller can essentially specify the grace period for payments when buyers have multiple items in their cart. The options are 3 days, 5 days, 7 days and 14 days etc. Naturally, I thought GMC must have had this setting at 3 days since eBay was restricting me at the 4 day mark and counting the items in my cart as unpaid item strikes.
I reached out to GMC and they confirmed that the Payment Deadline setting was indeed set to 7 days, which aligns them with the terms of what they advertise in every single listing.
As a result, I am at a loss as to why eBay continues to restrict my account if I do not pay within 4 days.
Again, this never used to happen to me and the seller has confirmed the correct shipping preference settings on their end. GMC sells well over a million cards per year, so I cannot imagine I am the only one experiencing this issue but it is not really their issue to fix...so thought I would post on here.
Anyone else experience something like this or have any ideas.
I am really down to two options....(1) request an invoice from them each time I win a number of items in one night as I heard this will reset the eBay window for when a payment is due or (2) waste time on the phone with customer service and see if I can get connected with an experienced rep that understands the issue and has a helpful solution/explanation.
Thanks.
