Insertion Fees Error??

[christworks]

I feel like I am losing my mind. 

Backstory: I noticed last Tuesday I had some listings renew and I was charged insertion fees for them. I have the Basic Store and around 1200 listings. I wasn't sure where I was at on my allotment for the month, but with that many listings, I wasn't shocked. 

I didn't think too much about it and figured since I am growing my store,  I would likely need to upgrade anyway in the near future. Once the calendar changed, I moved forward with adding some new listings last week.

Now, tonight, I needed to adjust my prices on a few things. I used bulk editor to edit the price about about 84 listings. I then submitted those from the bulk editor. I did not end any listings. This was a straight edit. I was going throw the motions and as I hit submit, I saw I was being charged. I couldn't stop it since I had already hit the button. So, I looked at my account activity and see that eBay is charging me insertion fees. What am I missing here? I still have over 800 left of my standard allotment. 

     

[mam98031]

You really need to talk to Ebay on this one.  I see what you are saying, so there is some kind of issue going on.  Do please update us once you find out what happened so we can be aware of this too.

BTW, you are no where near needing to upgrade your store.  Unless you plan on starting to carry a whole lot of listings beyond what you currently carry.  You can see that in the pic you shared above of the Promotional Tile in the Seller Hub.

[christworks]

@mam98031  Thank you. I have been able to duplicate it. This time I did not attempt to change anything. I just loaded them into the bulk editor. It is now generating an insertion fee for one listing. So now I am wondering if the charges last Tuesday were an error, too?

As far as the store, I realize there are categories where I get up to 10k free listings a month. I do have things that fall into that. I do a considerable amount of ending and relisting each month. I try to catch it before it automatically renews, but that isn't always possible. So it is possible for something to renew, and later on I end it and relist. Because of this, I can come close to exceeding the 1000 allotment when I have over 1,200 listings total.  Right now I am lined up to be at about 1,400 by the end of October and 1,600 by the end of the year. I just did a buy out of about 200 new items this weekend. There are a few multi-quantity mixed in, but most are singles. I'm going to be blasting those out over the next couple of weeks as I get things sorted. I do see the "Promotional" heading you are talking about, but I don't see anything "extra" that I’m getting. It is just what comes with the store level. 

[dhbookds]

..........this has happened several times before..........odd that you are the only one reporting it......can't see any mentions on Tech board....

[mam98031]

Did you verify that your account is actually being charged for these listing fees?  I remember there was a time, months ago, that something similar happened, but the seller's account actually didn't get charged.

Have you contacted Ebay and reported it?  What did they say?  Did they give you a ticket number?

[christworks]

@mam98031 

By the next day it has resolved itself and only 18 of the listings were actually charged the insertion fee, though it was many more than that when I submitted everything through bulk editor. Since I was only out about $5, calling eBay got put onto the back burner until today whilst I worked on a massive buy out I did a day before this issue happened.

I called eBay customer service today. This was honestly the worst customer service experience I've ever had. I will defend customer support day and night, but this was truly bad. I was on the phone 53 minutes!

The first 30 minutes were spent simply trying to get the customer service rep to understand the situation. Even when I thought they had, they came back with "You only get 250 listings per month, and after that you get charged insertion fees."  The bottom line is that the rep did not understand anything about eBay stores. They had no clue what comes along with an eBay store in terms of the number of free listings. He even told me that when some listings renew in a couple of days, I will be charged insertion fees on those.  He even seemed to think that just editing a listing, which is what I did, would generate an insertion fee. When he went to talking about a one-time courtesy refund and that I would be ineligible to ever have insertion fees refunded again, I had to get quite firm on the phone because obviously that's not right when this was an eBay glitch.

I was placed on hold over a dozen times during the call. I guess at some point he talked to someone who explained how the stores work and how many free listings I get every month. In the end he sent the issue to IT (even though it seems to be resolved - I've not had any more issues) - and I will supposedly be refunded "because eBay had a glitch".  He clarified this was not a courtesy refund.  Whether I will actually get refunded, who knows. If they do great, if not, oh well. I'm not spending another hour on the phone for $5. I shouldn't have this time. It goes against my principle of moving forward and don't look back when the amount involved is de minimis. 

The rep did not provide a ticket number. He did indicate he would follow up with me in a few days. 

[eburtonlab]

Possibly related?

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Report-eBay-Technical-Issues/Insertion-Fee-Credits/td-p/35288632/jump-...

[beadergrrl]

Not sure if this is related but I noticed ebay used 988 of my 1000 'free' listings...but only about 960 things had relisted. I'm not sure where the other listings went???? I have lots listed in the 10000 category as well. Not sure if they changed the categories included in the 10000 so now some of them are no longer free? Very frustrating and glad I caught it before I was charged for the 'over the limit' relists.