Community Chat, March 4 @ 1:00 pm PT - General Topics

[brian@ebay]

Join the Community team here at 1 PM PT on March 4th for our Weekly Chat with eBay Staff. We don't have a specific topic this week, so please bring any general questions you may have about buying or selling.

The chat will be open for questions from 1-2 pm PT, at which point we'll close thread from additional responses. After this time, we'll continue to work on responding to any queries that might still be unanswered.

If you're new to the chat, welcome!  Simply Reply to this post with your question from 1-2 PM Pacific Time and we'll be happy to look into it for you.

*Please note that we're not able to address account-specific queries. Questions regarding your account should be directed to eBay Customer Service.

[wooden_flower]

Hi there,

The posts about store v. no store reminded me to ask - what happened to the store calculator?  It used to be easy to plug in the number of listings, sales, etc to see how much you save with a store.

thanks!

Sue

[floriantet]

 I can confirm that there is a known issue that is causing a small number of buyers to experience the error message "Unable to process payment, please select another payment method."  Typically if a buyer selects a different payment method then it will go through, so I suggest trying another payment method if this error is encountered.

Thank you for the suggestion but all payment methods have been tried. I mean if PayPal does not work (with all possible sources including PayPal balance), credit card does not work and when I use an eBay gift card I get "sorry you can not use this method of payment" what different method you want me to use ?

I had 5 items from the same seller in my cart, I did check out and 3 went through and 2 did not go through; you realize this is not an issue that will not go away with selecting another method of payment.
It might affect only a small number of buyers on eBay (you make it sound like it is not important, so nothing will be done) but is more than 40% of my activity. What should I do ? stop using eBay ? 

[alan@ebay]

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@mam98031 wrote:

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques 

Give us some ideas of what he said for those of us that did not attend the Podcast please.

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Hi @mam98031, you can listen to the podcast here: https://community.ebay.com/t5/The-eBay-for-Business-Podcast/Episode-81-Spring-Seller-Update-amp-SVP-...

[tyler@ebay]

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@labs118 wrote:

tyler@ebay 

Hi Tyler 
Still haven't heard anything about the Store search  since the post from 2 weeks ago . there had been no updates?
Post #64

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Weekly-Chat-with-eBay-Staff/Community-Chat-February-19-1-00-pm-PT-Gene...

It would be nice if it was a Priority since so many of us are paying for stores & the Store search is not really working.
I know you have posted this is not how you search but not one person here can speak for how every buyer searches & it would be really great if this option worked as designed.

I am still coming up with Store not found when using the store search for myself & many others.
Can we please get this brought back to someone's attention 

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Hi @labs118 - I haven't heard anything on this yet, but I'll request an update!

[tyler@ebay]

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@vrykalak wrote:

@vrykalak wrote:

I had 44 of my "free 50" left on 2/29, so I posted 44 items...and got charged 25¢ apiece for them! Two different CS agents said they would fix it, but neither one did, and those charges are on my invoice now. Furthermore, no "free 50" showed up for March.

Hi @vrykalak - because you have a store subscription you will not see the 'Free 50' for March, those were replaced with the insertion fee credits that come with your store package. 

Likewise, you'd see the '50 free' promo prior to opening a store subscription, but after it's opened your insertion fee credits take precedence and you wouldn't see further credits on the '50 free' promo. That may be what happened. 

It sounds like you've been working with CS on this though, and they may still be reviewing it. I'd encourage you to contact them again if you still see those charges on your All Account Activity page after they said they'd credit it. 

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Both of the agents I talked to said that EVERY account was supposed to get the "free 50" whether or not you have a store. 
...If that's not true, that answers my question about whether or not to keep the store after the freebie period: NO.

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Hi @vrykalak - both agents you spoke with are incorrect. I will send appropriate coaching. 

[vrykalak]

@carlqsportscards wrote:

How does ebay's search function work with people who use initials instead of a first name?

Does it make any difference if in the title I use, for example, TJ or T.J. or T. J. (with a space between)

Hi @carlqsportscards - Best Match will read spaces and punctuation (so T J, T. J. and T.J.) as the same queries. No punctuation or spaces (TJ) would be run as its own query, which could provide different results. 

For example: when I do a search for TS Eliot I get ~4500 results. If I search for T. S. Eliot, T S Eliot or T.S. Eliot I get back the same search results of around 5k.

With regards to which benefits you more? I would go with the punctuation method, mostly because I'm a stickler. 

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So search for the LONGEST version of the keywords, and the eBay search will find the relevant items. (e.g., St. Patrick's Day...you get results with and without the "." and ";"
This is one of the few things the eBay search engine still does well.

[alan@ebay]

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@mam98031 wrote:

alan@ebay 

Excellent, thank you Alan.  Well at least our emojis now show up.  LOL

As to emojis.  They are so darn small.  Is there a way to increase their size just a little?

🍹

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Now that you mention it - they are pretty small. I'll look into our options on this. 

Thanks for calling it out!

[rosevelyn]

That happened to me as well the last days of February , and I posted on the Technical Issues page with a screenshot. I made sure I went under so that I would have listings left and it showed me that the listing fees were $0.00 until I submitted, and then I was charged $3.50 and had no listings left. Link to my post. https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Promotional-Fixed-Price-Listings-Shown-in-Seller-Hub-...

[a_c_green]

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alan@ebay wrote:

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@vrykalak wrote:

I signed up for an eBay UpFront meeting, and was perplexed to see that, while Paypal and Paypal Connect were allowed as payment options, eBay MasterCard was NOT. I think that should be fixed.

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That does sound odd. I will share your example with the events team and see if there's a possibility of having Mastercard added.  

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Just a thought: can you add your eBay MasterCard as a funding source for your PayPal account? That should enable you to go the PayPal route and still have the charge backed by your MasterCard account.

[Anonymous]

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@itscalledapostingid wrote:

Do you have any update on the issue of Ebay displaying "Same Day Shipping" on items with 1-day handling?
I think common sense should tell whoever programs the system that "Same Day Shipping" should never be displayed on items when the stated handling time is greater than zero days.
I have reported this problem to Ebay for over 3 months. They tell me "I will be covered; they will remove any negative feedback that results from this situation."
That tells me they know it will result in a bad buyer experience but they don't mind.

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Hi @itscalledapostingid, you are correct: same day shipping should not be displayed on items where the seller does not offer same day shipping. By their very nature, technical issues are not situations where the system is working as intended, and we are investigating as to why this experience is occurring so we can apply a fix. Our assurance to you that we will apply appropriate protections should not be interpreted as eBay not taking action on an issue, as we can both protect you from an error on our part and work to resolve that error. Solving technical issues can take quite a bit of time as we first must discover what the cause of the problem is. Though I don't have an update to provide at the moment, we'll continue to pass along examples and work with our tech teams on as solution.

[mam98031]

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alan@ebay wrote:

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@mam98031 wrote:

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques 

Give us some ideas of what he said for those of us that did not attend the Podcast please.

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Hi @mam98031, you can listen to the podcast here: https://community.ebay.com/t5/The-eBay-for-Business-Podcast/Episode-81-Spring-Seller-Update-amp-SVP-...

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I will take the time to listen to it and hope it isn't as disappointing as the first Town Hall meeting or the lack of any attention being paid to seller protection in  the Spring update.  Yet Ebay saw the need to increase a buyer's rights in the return process.  I know that isn't your fault.  Just a little venting.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

mam,

This is part of what he said, I found a copy and paste I had emailed to a friend. I've broken it up so its not a wall of text.

It is great to be here. So I joined in 2004, I joined EBAY and was here through 2016 and then I went to Walmart for three years. Like, ugh crazy. But the truth is I figured if I was going to compete with Amazon and lose, I wasn’t going to do that here. I was going to do that at Walmart and it was an amazing experience. But when I left actually wasn’t really happy with where eBay was going and pointed. This is an incredible company.

The danger with working here as long as I’ve been here. The probably is not a category I haven’t shopped or collected in and I’ve got bins of NASCAR I-PASS, PDR buckles, comics, fortune magazines, all these like crazy things. First purchase was in 2001. Got 1,211 feedback. Before I left was Top Rated Seller. Griff trying to goad me a couple times into committing to be a Top Rated Seller again and the truth is, the bar is even higher now then it was when I left but I really love eBay. What brought me back to eBay was as I’m sure many of you know, like all this stuff going on here and not all of it’s like up into the right in terms of sales and if you sell in different categories, you probably felt that. But man, there’s so much potential.

Amazon and Walmart are amazing. They are going toe-to-toe and the retail apocalypse that you’ve probably seen in your towns and everything that’s going on that’s going to continue. Like the truth is, you know we’ve had over 10,000 brick and mortar stores close year to date in the US. Most of it is like not to scale regional semi national chains that just can’t source at the cost of what Walmart and Amazon can do. And yet for me, like what’s so amazing is like the more time I spent at Walmart, the more it gave me strength and conviction around all the things I love about eBay. Cause that isn’t us. That isn’t what makes up all the amazing categories. And Amazon sells apparel, Walmart does apparel. You sell apparel. What you’re selling is not what Amazon and Walmart are sourcing by the boatload. I mean, I came back, we’re talking about, you know, okay, well how many TVs we’re selling on daily deals. On black Friday, Walmart is literally selling 10,000 TVs per second. Under what scenario are we going to be able to source with our sellers in selling new in-box 32 inch TV at a lower cost then Walmart and Amazon? Like, that’s crazy. But we become obsessed as a company about trying to be someone that we were not.

And then I think when you go in and look at the categories where we actually have these amazing enthusiast groups on the site and it’s everything from parts to comics, to collectibles, a lot of tropical plants on eBay. And then I don’t think anyone in the room sells lady bugs but there is a great lady bug seller in California that I buy from. Cause they keep all of the Aphids and bugs off my Palm trees. All of that, that’s eBay.

And so when I kind of, you know, came back and was excited to do, like if it can be mirrored across 5,000 stores, if it can be mirrored across hundreds of fulfillment centers, let Amazon and Walmart go at it. And then what does that leave for us? A whole lot of GMV, a whole lot sales. We first started having this conversation, like this is a little bit crazy, but if you do the math and you say, okay look like new in season retail, apparel, TVs, all that stuff, ignore that. And then you want to focus on all the categories that are awesome for eBay, Clearance, shelf pulls, and minus one, refurbished, used. There’s actually more total market volume there than there is in what’s going on in the Amazon, Walmart world. And then, you know, the reality is those segments are growing as fast or faster than the spaces Amazon has been playing.

We just kind of weren’t paying attention. So there’s all these startups and competitors playing in space that actually should be eBays. It shouldn’t even exist. They shouldn’t have gotten started, we kind of let that happen. All of that is kind of this roundabout way of me sort of describing like, you know why I came back. Why I think there’s so much opportunity here. And we’ve got tenured sellers, we’ve got people in the room that have run businesses and left. We’ve got people that just, long time sellers on the platform and probably one of those common questions I get after like “why did you actually come back”, is like kinda like, you know, “give us a reason to believe.” Cause a lot of headlines show how fast everyone else is growing. And when I look inside and look where we have potential, like man, there’s um, there’s a lot of upside. But uh, I don’t think we’ve actually give ourselves permission to recognize what is the magic that is eBay.

And so how are we going to start to differentiate our experience? Like I joke, you know, for those of you who are Top Rated Seller, you can probably describe requirements better than I can. Zero-day handling two day shipping. And one of the things I’m kind of joking on is well, like two days is either infinitely too fast or is 1.9 days too slow. People now are just like, what? I’m not going to get it for free same day? Uh, and so like that’s not really a logical competitive edge for us. And yet I don’t think when you’re finding like the perfect IT, the hard to find part, like these things, you don’t need to get zero handling and have it show up in two days, like you found the product at the right price. And so then I’m going like, well why are we asking sellers to jump through these hoops that buyers actually don’t even want in that category? Doesn’t make any sense. From my side on the business angle, a lot more focus on how we’re going to make it more relevant retail standards. What are the categories in which you sell? If you are selling collectibles and comics, you know what? Some categories like actually no returns is the standard return policy. How do we think about actually changing what the shipping times need to look like? And it’s not about the constant guard railing. Are we solving for buyers or are we solving for sellers? When I talk to buyers in these categories, none of these things are surprising for them. Like they don’t have an expectation of getting two days shipping or getting returns in these categories. And so I don’t think running a market place means somebody has to lose in the transaction. Like we can actually create that balance.

[rosevelyn]

Does the Technical Issues page get looked at? I had the same issue. Here's my post. https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Promotional-Fixed-Price-Listings-Shown-in-Seller-Hub-...

[millcreekrescue909]

Amen to that!

[brian@ebay]

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@wooden_flower wrote:

Hi there,

The posts about store v. no store reminded me to ask - what happened to the store calculator?  It used to be easy to plug in the number of listings, sales, etc to see how much you save with a store.

thanks!

Sue

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Hi @wooden_flower, good question! The Store Calculator feature was retired when the new store tiers were released a couple of years ago.