Troubleshooting Errors with Adding a Bank Account for Payouts (Not Documented by eBay)

[mtgpioneerking]

I thought I would share some information I compiled since last June dealing with eBay's recent and continually revising policies regarding using their Managed Payments system for sellers, particularly when adding a bank (checking) account as a payout method. While their documentation previously established some of this information, it is no longer available (at least I could not find it on their official help page after much searching). Some of this information is in the Terms of Conditions if you have the patience to get into that buried info.

If you are among the few who try to add a savings account, presently that is not supported, but if it goes through, I imagine the information below will also be helpful.

If you attempted to add your bank account and got a generic and entirely useless error message that your bank could not be verified or that something went wrong and to try again later, here are the likely causes in order of what eBay's customer service agents know to what they are not informed about.

1. Your first name, last name, or address may not match what your bank account has. This is an unlikely outcome if you are careful when setting up your eBay account, but it is worth doing a quick double check. If all that is good, then it might be that...

2. If you were entering your account information manually, you might have missed a digit. While you can copy and past your routing and account numbers, the "re-type your account number" entry must be typed in manually. Just try it again and be careful. If you're sure you made no typos, then it might be that...

3. If your Payments page is showing that your bank account is seemingly added (by bank name and the last four digits of your account), but the micro-deposits never arrived or you are trying to verify your bank account by using the bank login, then what likely happened is that you manually added the bank account and mistype or swapped digits prior to the last four digits of your account number. You will need to go back to your Payments page and "Delete" the current bank account which will then force you to "Add" a new one. As with issue #2 above, just be careful that you type everything in correctly. If even this is done correctly, and you're still plagued with this error dilemma, then it's 99.999% due to...

4. Congratulations! You achieved eBay "Don't Know Zone"... mostly, but a few do. What happened here is that you already have two other eBay accounts linked to the bank account you are trying to link now, and by default that is the maximum you can have... without approval (prior to some changes last year you could have up to five eBay accounts linked to the same bank account before encountering such an issue).

    To get this issue resolved now, you will need to contact the Managed Payments team and "aggressively" request to be transferred to the leadership team and possibly the specialized leadership team. Ask them to contact someone in the tech/dev/back end team and have them "whitelist" your eBay account and provide them the bank account you are trying to link. This jargon of a term merely means that they will open up access for your eBay account to link to this already linked bank account. Note that you can whitelist up to three additional eBay accounts to the same bank account, achieving eBay's (seemingly) absolute maximum of five eBay accounts linked to the same bank account.

Most eBay agents and many of the leadership team do not know about this because unfortunately many of them are convinced that the troubleshooting guide and copy/paste responses they are given to use is the be all, end all, and if something doesn't get resolved by it, well then surely you can keep trying the same thing over and over hoping for a different result that will never be achieved. Heaven forbid that a user knows what s/he is talking about and knows more than them. It was through the grace of two team leads who recognized and cared enough that something unfamiliar was happening and dug into the issue to talk to a tech who explained the likely remaining issue and found a way to resolve it.

Presently, this scenario is not documented in their help pages either in the multiple accounts policy page nor in their managed payments page. Also, as this issue only affects users who have more than two selling accounts (and only one checking account). If you run to this issue and wind up in Scenario 4 above, it's a multiple account issue.

If you are convinced you do not have two accounts already linked, just talk to an agent and have them look up your name to see if they can find any other accounts linked to your name (and possibly address). Of course, if you had a different name or address before on another two eBay accounts with that old information but linked to the bank account you want and forgot about those eBay accounts, then just hope eBay can find them in their system.

[Anonymous]

Where do I go to see if the name I used to sign up with eBay matches the name on my bank account.. My profile only shows my seller code name. 

[eburtonlab]

Your  name can be found in your Personal Info:

https://accountsettings.ebay.com/profile

[mtgpioneerking]

The above reply is optimal.

[fastback40]

great article but its not the issue and has nothing to do with whitelist. I had the issue for 3weeks and solved it. 

[mtgpioneerking]

What is "it" in your response? And how did your issue get resolved? Without that information, making such a deterministic statement is useless, especially as I have the months of evidence to back up what I break down in my original post.

[futuristicgains]

I am seriously having the same problem and tired of people non-chalant attitudes about it. I have 3 different checking accounts and tried to use them all to see if I can get through with any of them but all i've gotten so far was bad luck. Is there a freaking glitch with eBay or something with them not allowing sellers to add bank account information for MP at this time or something? It's so lame and frustrating. They should've never left Paypal. I don't care about the soap opera drama about why they couldn't work out. eBay has enough money to buy Paypal and leave things the way they were for sellers. MP has been a hot mess ever since they started forcing it. People scrambling trying to do whatever to stay on but when these glitches and mishaps happen, when you call support, eBay acts like they don't know how to fix the issue when they are the ones that caused it. When Paypal was around, this was NEVER the issue. Hope somebody come up with an actual solution and chill out with the facetious answers. 

[mtgpioneerking]

Hi futuristicgains,

I by no means am saying that my solution is THE solution. It is the resolution that worked for me on two different accounts. It is very possible that there are other causes of this problem potentially connected to what "state" (in the sense of whether all data is filled out or in agreement with your bank account).

In regard to eBay's incompetence in this matter, I will be the first to enthusiastically nod my head. Unfortunately, other online selling platform alternatives have not brought me as much traffic or flexibility so I resign myself to just keep wasting my time dealing with eBay's customer support when 99% of the time they do not know more than I do.

That aside, you have three bank accounts you are trying to link. I am not part of eBay support, but if you do not mind, can we go through some checklist (I will skip over the name thing because I will assume you did that quick check and I am going to skip over asking what error message you get because it will be the same useless generic one that I kept on getting).

1. Are your banks named banks that eBay lists specifically when you add your bank account? If not, have you checked to see if eBay supports electronic transfers with your bank(s)?

In principle, my "if not" inquiry should not be an issue because managed payments is simply a direct deposit/withdrawal setup and should be a simple electronic data interchange process. However, there does exist the possibility that certain validations or format of how the bank information is sent that is different enough from what eBay can process.

2. Do you have any other eBay accounts linked to any of those bank accounts?

If you are not sure, you can contact eBay support and with some validation they can inform you whether your bank account or name is attached to any eBay accounts that you might have forgotten if you opened one many moons ago.

3. If my experience and the above steps are just sending you in circles, then I must insist that you insist to speak to a manager of a higher team. Even if the agent says that they want a chance to help you, just keep pushing to chat with a manager of the higher selling/account team. The managers are more likely to either know more or have more direct access to consult with members of the dev/tech backend team who actually know more and can coordinate between the three of you to arrive at the cause of the problem.

If the resolution you get is different than what I shared here, please add it to this page as I would like to know.

In regard to your comment about PayPal, I agree. I won't even excuse eBay for being a selling platform while doubling as a payment platform. They were once part of the same ownership. Lately, eBay has been rolling out much needed updates to their selling functionality although some of those features fail to work as necessary yet their managed payments system is still a dysfunctional mystery.

It's my conjecture that their development team simply does not know how to run tests for revisions to their platform or does not care enough to do so properly. It's also unclear if they have a testbed server where they implement these changes first or simply make them to the official website and hope for the best.