Local Pickup QR Problems

[nps]

We've been selling on eBay for over 23 years and also have local pickup with all of our offers.  We have a significant amount of pickups every day and some of these customers have been coming to pickup for nearly the whole time we have been on eBay.  Our standard MO was to have them show ID and sign an invoice we kept on a digital file and if anyone contested they got their order, which was very rare,  we would provide the signed copy to eBay as proof.  We would mark customer's orders as picked up the moment they picked up their item(s) without using the pickup code.  Now, we are seeing within the past day that we are not able to do this anymore without providing the required code. 

So now we are asking customers to give us their QR code and sometimes it isn't working, so we contacted support and were notified that the QR code is only good for 48 hours.  A lot of customers of ours come in only once a week and will pickup sometimes 3 to 4 orders at a time.  If I tell any of them we can't release the product they paid for because they have an expired QR code, what do you think their reaction will be?  The eBay support person on the phone said that you could get them to leave positive feedback and then reach out to eBay to have them release the funds on the order.  What a hassle! I have dozens of orders on my shelf right at this moment.  

Can someone explain to me the purpose of having a QR codes expire?  Any suggestions that would be helpful to our situation would be appreciated.

[wooden_flower]

@nps 

I have never heard of the QR code expiring in 48 hours. I have had local pickups more than a week after the sale with no issues.

The buyer also gets a 6 digit code to use in place of the QR code. If the QR code won't work, try the 6 digit code.

The local pickup selling page does not mention any time limit, and still says to have the buyer sign a copy of the order if you can't use the app. I would then just manually mark it shipped.

With your level of sales, are your payments really being held until delivery or pickup? I would expect your funds to be released in 2 business days, regardless of the order status 🙂

[nps]

Thanks wooden_flowers for you input.  

It could be possible that the eBay merchant support agent gave us some information that was not fully accurate.  We normally get our funds released as soon as tracking is provided or items are marked as picked up.  What led us to call support was when a couple of our customers came in to pick up and we tried to manually change the status to picked up and it wouldn't work.  We then tried to use the 6 digit code they brought with them and that failed also.  The QR code also failed.  We called merchant support and the agent on the phone said that the code was only good for 48 hours and that we should make sure customers were coming in and picking up within a day, 2 days at the most.  We were also told that we shouldn't release any product to customers until we could successfully process their pickup code.  We asked about what to do when customers that didn't make it in within the 48 hours, and the answer we were given was to get the customer to leave a positive feedback and then contact merchant support and request our funds.

Being told this by merchant support sent us into a little bit of a panic since we have several orders that are more than 2 days old awaiting pickup.  I could not find an eBay announcement in regards to changes to local pickup requirements.

Has anyone else experienced issues with marking local pickup items picked up?

[wooden_flower]

@nps 

You might want to ask on the seller’s board where more people can respond. I have not seen anyone else post about this.

Have you tried reviewing the actual funds release on pickup items? I still can’t believe that your funds are not made available as soon as they finish processing, which is 2 business days.  🤔

[nps]

Thanks!  I will do that.