eBay

adithiel · ‎04-13-2018

Dear Members,

I am a smith from Hungary and selling my products in eBay since 2010. Up to the summer of 2017 everything went well, but that time some serious technical errors appeared in almost all of my ca. 60 active listings. I have only recognised that my eBay monthly selling decreased dramatically, but unfortunately I only realized for about 3 months that the reason is these technical errors.

The 3 main technical errors:
Error #1: In case of the listings there are no pictures available about my items, however I uploaded them. When I revise the listings and upload the pictures again, they are removed again in some weeks.
Error #2: The shipping cost increased to $35 in all my listings, however I set much lower shipping cost ($10 or $15) in most cases. When I reset the shipping cost to a lower value, it will increase to $35 in some weeks again.
Error #3: There are excluded shipping destinations in my listings, however I ship worldwide and I set no exclusions in my listings. When I reset this and set again “no excluded countries”, there will be excluded countries in my listings again in some weeks.
I captured 3 screenshots about these errors see them attached.

Just for example here you may check some of my listings affected:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/182464013052
https://www.ebay.com/itm/172596440458
https://www.ebay.com/itm/182505338025
https://www.ebay.com/itm/172429166642
https://www.ebay.com/itm/173121769352
https://www.ebay.com/itm/172654813330

I tried to solve the problems alone, I tried to revise my listings again and again (upload the photos and reset the shipping settings), but the errors appeared again 1-2 weeks after the revision. I revised all my listings 5 times up to now and each time it took about 3 hours, so I am getting tired...

I supposed that the errors may be caused by some kind of active content in my listings. I know that since June 2017, eBay no longer supports active content in any listings. So I used the “Mobile friendly checker” for my item descriptions to check whether is there any active content in my description, but there was no active content found (I only use text in my item descriptions and one or two links). There was only written, that “Viewport meta tag incorrect or missing” (cf. the last screenshot attached). Also I tried to click on “Fix it for me” and “Save” in all my listings but this also did not helped and after I revised all my listings the errors appeared again in some weeks.

It seems that this is a kind of system error of eBay and I cannot solve these technical problems alone. I asked the customer service of eBay for help but they could not help. I received replies for my messages always from different persons who mostly did not understand the problem itself at all. After 27 messages I had to give up communicating with the customer service.

Has anyone already met similar techical problems? I hope someone has an idea, what should I do.

Adam

berserkerplanet · ‎04-13-2018

Greetings from California

Have not seen this before, so have nothing specific.

No ideas on the disappearing photo issue.

Are you shipping charges set as a flat rate shipping charge of $10 or $15 in your listings?

Try going to https://cgi5.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ExcludeShippingList and see if there are excluded countries there. If so, uncheck them, tick the "Apply to all current live listings" check box, "Apply", and then check some of your listings to see if it "took". I guess you might have to wait (days or weeks?) to see if it reverts.

Does these glitches occur for new listings created from scratch also, or are you creating new listings from a template or via "sell similar"?

If the latter, it may be some sort of "corruption" propagating in the templates/existing listings (there was something along those kines that happened on some seller's listings - mine included - a while back in regards to a FedEx shipping calculator bug that required something like a change to a site setting, an edit of the listings, reversion of the site setting and a re-edit to get whatever it was out of the listings)

dhbookds · ‎04-15-2018

Since you are in Hungary......and I don't know rules on ebay there........these are just ideas........ I would post on a common market board and see if they have other ideas.....but:

Agree with above poster that some items/knives may be prohibited for import to some of those countries.....when the bots find them, they put in the exclusions

Pictures may have something to do with the logo you have on some.......which is prohibited in US , again bots finding them after a time and removing the picture.

Never heard of flat rate shipping changing......that is a mystery and if you find out how/why, hope you will post.

I do note some of your items have warnings from ebay that "none have sold in 16 months". I would end those.....change up the title and remove the verbiage from the pictures and relist.

What I think I would do is create absolutely new listings for a couple of the ones that are causing problems. leave out the links, remove the name from the pictures, change the titles a bit, and see if those get changed. ( I would research the import question first).......

sorry can't help more.......

adithiel · ‎08-06-2018

Thank you for your help, but finally nothing has helped to solve the mentioned problems. Finally I deleted all my listings and uploaded them again from the begining. This was 3 mounths ago and it seems the problems has not apeared again.