Shipping Labels

[todajajo]

Is anyone else unable to purchase a shipping label? I keep getting an error message that says "It was not possible to generate the label. Something is wrong. Please try again later."

[redmodelt]

Could be specific to the service used, looks to be in this case UPS.  (Golf Club)

Or are you trying to use different service then what was shown in the listing?

Sorry that is all I got, re helping. 

Oh!  Are you trying to ship to PO box or international?

[wastingtime101]

This is a known issue @todajajo.

Contact customer service using the chat option on the left side of this page:

https://www.ebay.com/help/contact_us?id=4002&st=10

Ask them to add your account to ALERT14466

In the meantime, suggestions to work around this include:

- Make sure all fields on the listing form are filled out accurately (weight, dimensions, potentially customs info) and that the package size/weight does not exceed what's allowed for the service you're using.

- Try again later.

- Try a different browser.

- Purchase the label elsewhere (pirateship.com is an option). Don't forget to add the tracking number to eBay.

[wastingtime101]

Also check to make sure the buyer's address isn't too long. Sometimes buyers enter too much info in street address, so you need to split it between 2 lines.

[todajajo]

Thank you for your answers. I messaged the buyer. It turns out that the address was a military base. The name is in the process of being changed from Fort Hood to Fort Cavazos. As soon as I used the new name, I was able to print a label.

Thanks again!

[argy_eyes]

@wastingtime101 elizabeth@ebay 

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

Also check to make sure the buyer's address isn't too long. Sometimes buyers enter too much info in street address, so you need to split it between 2 lines.

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I have done this more than once. 

Suggestion: When a user registers their address, the text they input should be run through the code that is used to generate shipping labels to see if the user's input will work, and flagged accordingly if it doesn't. This would prevent the aggravation and inevitable errors that will occur when the seller hacks the buyer's input.

Suggested alert: "Registered address generates errors in shipping label."

(Though I see from the OP's follow-up that their case was due to the Army changing the name of the buyer's base, a case of unintended consequences that no coding could anticipate.)

Mike

[wastingtime101]

In the address field, these are the different character limits based on carrier:

UPS: 35 per line

FedEx: 30 per line

USPS: 44 address line 1 / 42 address line 2, but others have reported eBay rejecting anything longer than 40 when you buy the label through them.

It's been questioned here for years why eBay allows buyer entries longer than 40 characters at the time of purchase when the shipping label system does not accept it.

[a_c_green]

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@todajajo wrote:

Thank you for your answers. I messaged the buyer. It turns out that the address was a military base. The name is in the process of being changed from Fort Hood to Fort Cavazos. As soon as I used the new name, I was able to print a label.

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That's bizarre... I wonder if it had some kind of mismatch between the old name and the ZIP code assigned to it.

I have just thrown in the towel on my own fight with the "Something is wrong" message, and switched to a different shipping method to get my international package out the door. I have a buyer in China who purchased an inexpensive item from me (no scam risk or worries about losing it) and paid for eBay International Standard Delivery, with which I've had no problems in the past when shipping to other countries, other than a staggering delay at the consolidation center before the item would make its way out of the country.

In this case, I can find nothing wrong with his address, no long lines, and I verified details like the correct spelling of his street address and City, correct Postal Code, etc. Package is 1 pound, 9 ounces; dimensions are 10"x8"x6". Item is not restricted for importing. Nevertheless, I get the red banner line and absolutely no clue about what the problem is.

I finally ate the pricing difference and sent the package via First Class Package International for $27.41 instead of $24 for eISD. What's irritating here, besides the useless error message, is the lack of international tracking or Delivery Confirmation via FCPI due to China not being a member of the e-DELCON countries, where eISD promises to provide it (and has in the past, despite being really pokey, speed-wise).

Best I can think of here is that FCPI will at least go straight out the door headed for China, where eISD would head for the nearest consolidation center, then loll about for days before any further movement occurs. The difference in estimated delivery dates was significant: a full two weeks sooner for FCPI over eISD, so there's that to look forward to at least.

[wastingtime101]

The tech ticket ALERT14466 was initially created because sellers were getting that error message for ESE and EISD shipments @a_c_green, so it's not surprising to hear you hit a sudden block trying to create an EISD label. Some sellers have days where it works and days where it doesn't.

Later eBay reps said sellers could get added to that tech ticket when seeing the error for any shipping service, so the problem appears to be spreading. It's been several months - frustrating they haven't nailed this one down yet.

[a_c_green]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

The tech ticket ALERT14466 was initially created because sellers were getting that error message for ESE and EISD shipments @a_c_green, so it's not surprising to hear you hit a sudden block trying to create an EISD label. Some sellers have days where it works and days where it doesn't.

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Indeed. I've had recent eISD shipments to Canada and Australia that had no problems with label printing and were comparable to what I was trying to ship to China this morning. 

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

Later eBay reps said sellers could get added to that tech ticket when seeing the error for any shipping service, so the problem appears to be spreading. It's been several months - frustrating they haven't nailed this one down yet.

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IMHO, a lot of their problems are self-inflicted, in that sloppy coding and poor testing (if any) allow this rubbish into Production.

Specifically in this case, we're getting an error message that conveys absolutely nothing about what has gone wrong: no hints about what else the user could or should do to correct the problem, or details (such as an error message or error code) that the user could report back to Customer Service or Tech Support or whomever. When the code goes wrong, we learn nothing.

In applications like this with multiple moving parts, it's imperative that the actions going on behind the scenes are monitored by error-handling code, so that when Something Bad happens, a specific error (or error code) will be returned, giving  some insight into what went wrong. Without it, we're just guessing.

Lazy programming like this that simply returns one generic error message if the entire process fails is frustrating not only to the user, who has no idea what to try next, but also to whichever programmer is tasked with trying to fix it, as he or she has no pointer to where to start looking, and is forced to try to reproduce the error by retracing the steps of one or more users reporting the problem and hoping that the malfunction will occur again. eBay needs to do much better with this.

[wastingtime101]

Completely agree.

With the OP it turned out to not be the error many (including yourself) have been running into. They had an issue with the shipping address, yet the OP saw the same generic message.

Leaves sellers completely in the dark about what to do, especially if the handling time is short.

[a_c_green]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

With the OP it turned out to not be the error many (including yourself) have been running into. They had an issue with the shipping address, yet the OP saw the same generic message.

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After staring at the Shipping page again for my problem package of this morning (a shipment to China that I could not print through eBay), one thing I noticed about the buyer's address was that his Country Code (for China) had been entered as CHN rather than CN.

While CHN is a valid alternative to CN (and ROC is also), I'm wondering whether the form was set up to only understand CN for China, and was barfing over the value of CHN. (If it was reading only the first two letters of the Country Code value, "CH" would decode as Switzerland, but the 6-digit Chinese Postal Code would be too long to work as a Swiss code.) Unfortunately that was also the only field of the buyer's address that I could not edit in order to try out that theory. Guess we'll never know for sure.