Community Chat, October 14 @ 1:00 pm PT - General Topics

[tyler@ebay]

Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us for the Weekly Chat with eBay Staff. We don't have a specific topic this week, so feel free to share any general buying or selling questions you may have.

The chat thread will remain open until 2 PM PT at which point we'll close it from additional responses. After that time, we'll continue to work on responding to any queries that might still be unanswered.

To post your question, click Reply in the lower right corner of this post, type your question, and hit submit between 1-2 PM Pacific Time. The format of our chat mirrors the format of our Community Discussion Boards, where each post will appear in the thread chronologically. The Community Team will review each question as it comes in, and will quote the original question in our reply. This quote and the reply will appear later in the thread, so just keep scrolling down to see our answers.

Missed the chat? Send your questions to the podcast by calling  888-723-4630 or email us at podcast@ebay.com and maybe your questions will make it on the air! Or listen to past episodes while you wait for next Wednesday!

[mybargaincomics]

My CTO and his team have built a v0.1 eBay integration. However, we are at a crossroads with multi-user access, live/scheduled listings, whether to move forward with the API that we're using, etc.. I would love to speak to someone familiar with the Comics category and eBay's roadmap in order to make better decisions and investments that will benefit both Comics sellers and eBay. Is there anyone that you can point me to who could give me a few minutes of their time to discuss?

Edit: Reply to this post can be read here

[alcoforever]

How should a buyer respond when he has been a victim of the wrong address scam.   This is a scam where the seller sends a small worthless item with tracking to a different addressee in the buyer's same zip code.

The buyer cannot file an INR because tracking shows delivery.   I'm told the buyer can't file a SNAD because he has nothing to return.

So what should a buyer do?

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Edit: A reply to your question can be found here

[mybargaincomics]

Looking for people that are now in similar positions for Comics as the following people were in the past/present for their respective categories:

Nicole Colombo, General Manager of Trading Cards
Sam Bright, Senior Director of Art & Collectibles 
Mark Flaa, Category Director of Arts & Collectibles 

Already tried rebecca at ebay and Brian Burke. No replies

[mam98031]

I wanted to reach out and extend a BIG THANK YOU to those involved in creating and posting the new graphics regarding MP.  It is fantastic and saves a whole lot of time explaining things.  It is well done and well presented.  Thank you to all those involved.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Payments/Infographic-How-payouts-work-on-managed-payments/m-p/31272627...

Edit: Reply to this post can be read here

[brian@ebay]

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@mybargaincomics wrote:

My CTO and his team have built a v0.1 eBay integration. However, we are at a crossroads with multi-user access, live/scheduled listings, whether to move forward with the API that we're using, etc.. I would love to speak to someone familiar with the Comics category and eBay's roadmap in order to make better decisions and investments that will benefit both Comics sellers and eBay. Is there anyone that you can point me to who could give me a few minutes of their time to discuss?

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@mybargaincomics I can't really speak to a categories strategy for the future and that information is likely proprietary and not something we'd share much detail about. If you have any questions about API integration then you can go here. 

[windhaze]

Glitches galore here-any update on when they will be fixed?

I know Brian has been working on it but it seems to be getting worse by the day.

Here's the link to where there are many of them posted (although I have seen them posted randomly elsewhere here as well.)

Thanks.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Community-Platform-Feedback/bd-p/CommunityNews

Edit: Reply to this post can be read here

[brian@ebay]

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@mam98031 wrote:

I wanted to reach out and extend a BIG THANK YOU to those involved in creating and posting the new graphics regarding MP.  It is fantastic and saves a whole lot of time explaining things.  It is well done and well presented.  Thank you to all those involved.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Payments/Infographic-How-payouts-work-on-managed-payments/m-p/31272627...

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@mam98031 glad to hear  you found it helpful 🙂

[carlqsportscards]

I got an offer on a GTC listing. The email claimed the offer was good for just a few minutes, because the item was "ending" in a few minutes. But the offer was actually good for a day, because the item relisted automatically.

Ebay needs to correct the wording in the email.

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Edit: A reply to your question can be found here

[tyler@ebay]

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@alcoforever wrote:

How should a buyer respond when he has been a victim of the wrong address scam.   This is a scam where the seller sends a small worthless item with tracking to a different addressee in the buyer's same zip code.

The buyer cannot file an INR because tracking shows delivery.   I'm told the buyer can't file a SNAD because he has nothing to return.

So what should a buyer do?

---

Hi @alcoforever  - this is a situation where a buyer should contact Customer Support for assistance. They can review the specifics of the situation and help accordingly. 

[mybargaincomics]

Thank you Brian. Technical questions aside, there must be someone responsible for the Comics category in eBay, just like in Trading Cards and other categories. Since I'm going to be the largest seller in the future in ebay's Comics category, it would be nice to establish a relationship with that person in the present. Is there a point of contact that you could provide? 

[moritwinterber-2]

Hello, our Developer Account got suspended without any notice. Can you please advise? I can open a premium ticket, because we cant log in.

Edit: Reply to this post can be read here

[alboxman]

No refund of FVFs on partial refunds with managed payments

My account was recently moved over to eBay managed payments.  Unfortunately, I am now being told that eBay is not refunding FVFs on partial refunds to buyers for combined shipping discounts.  Although the process for these refunds was never automatic, eBay previously refunded FVFs when a seller manually requested them (and PayPal, of course, did an automatic refund for their percentage fee WITHOUT requiring a request from the seller).

This becomes significant when you add up all the many ways that eBay prohibits buyers from combining orders, including the following:

 The limit eBay has on the number of different items per order (40).  So, when a customer buys 120 items from me on the same day, they have to split this in to three orders, each of which has its own postage calculation (and then I have to refund the buyer the excess postage)
The combined weight calculation in eBay is limited to 1 ounce increments, which means there is always an overpricing on very lightweight items.   This is particularly a problem when the calculated weight goes over 16 ounces, because the automatic calculations of eBay kick the pricing into priority mail costs.
The KNOWN issue where a certain number of buyers can not add items to their carts under certain circumstances.  In a recent week, THREE of my customers ran into this issue and eBay support acknowledged this was a known issue (and hinted it was unlikely to ever be fixed).
The KNOWN issue where a customer can not request a total in their shopping cart whenever the seller has already sent them an invoice.   So, if a buyer buys 3 items, and I send them an invoice, and they add a single additional item to their cart, they can not request a total!!
Problems which eBay international customers (and many mobile users) have with the shopping cart.
The inability to do automatic weight calculations between two different shipping rules in eBay.

I (and many other sellers) feel like eBay is deliberately avoiding addressing concerns about problems buyers have with combining orders SPECIFICALLY because eBay makes more fees when the buyer pays extra postage and then the seller refunds the postage. 

Frankly, this seems like outright robbery!.  The original reason why eBay said they needed to collect FVFs on postage was to prevent sellers from overcharging on postage to avoid fees.  But NOW eBay is causing an overcharge of postage rates which bumps up eBay’s revenue.  In addition, the reason eBay always claimed that a seller had to MANUALLY request a refund of FVFs was because PayPal was a separate service so they could not do it automatically.  I was actually told that one of the reasons eBay was moving to managed payments was to SOLVE issues like this (so they could offer automatic refund of FVFs when a buyer did a refund).

It is almost criminal to not refund the FVFs under any partial refund scenario.  I know for a fact that percentage charges which credit cards and PayPal assesses on payments are refunded back to eBay for the portion of the refund that a seller makes.  So, eBay actually is getting those REFUNDS back from the credit cards or PayPal and making MORE money when a seller does a partial refund!!  And, the original argument eBay made for charging FVFs on postage costs is now shown to be just an excuse that was used to get more fees out of the sellers.

How can we get this charged back to the previous accounting model for refunds?  This is a huge mental issue for many sellers, including myself, because we feel eBay has done a “bait and switch” on the model as part of their switch to managed payments, WITHOUT fixing the underlying problems which are preventing buyers from getting the proper combined payments model.  

Every refund I now make to a seller for combined shipping (several times each week) leaves me with an awful taste in my mouth for eBay’s refusal to fix any of their many problems related to the shopping cart or other limitation.

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Edit: A reply to your comments can be found here

[tyler@ebay]

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@carlqsportscards wrote:

I got an offer on a GTC listing. The email claimed the offer was good for just a few minutes, because the item was "ending" in a few minutes. But the offer was actually good for a day, because the item relisted automatically.

Ebay needs to correct the wording in the email.

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Hi @carlqsportscards - thanks for this input! Do you happen to have the email still? I'd love to grab a screenshot to include in the report. 

[a_c_green]

Hello all!

Per our conversation from last Wednesday (here) and last Monday (here), have you been able to glean any updates from the relevant Engineering people regarding progress on the two problems reported in the past couple of months? I have an update for you on one of them (below), and it's not good.

• Shipping form is loading with package dimensions backwards, in the wrong fields: Length gets the Height value and Height gets the Length value. This will result in wrong coding decisions using those values.

• Blocked Bidder List (here): ID listing is now sorted incomprehensibly by account creation date (using the member's internal ID number), and fails to include a space following each comma between values, forcing the display to break lines on secondary characters only, such as hyphens in the middle of a user ID, and producing a display that's largely gibberish.

I'm afraid I have further bad news on that second item above: the same illiterate coding revision has now been applied to the Buyer Requirements Exemption List (here) as well. It had been displaying correctly as recently as a day or two earlier this week, long after the problems with the similar Blocked Bidder List page had been reported.

This is getting worse, not better. Someone unqualified on the Engineering side is releasing untested code into the Production (public-facing) area of the eBay site, code that would not pass even the most rudimentary QA testing and peer review, and they need to be stopped before further problems are introduced.

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Edit: A reply to your question can be found here