eBay

coffeebean832 · ‎07-08-2020

I asked a few questions about Puerto Rico in today's chat-https://community.ebay.com/t5/Weekly-Chat-with-eBay-Staff/Community-Chat-July-8-1-00-pm-PT-General-T....

I looked at my last couple orders more closely and can see what I think might be causing the issue from my first question. I wanted to get you this additional info in case it helps with getting this sorted out.

@Anonymous brian@ebay tyler@ebay

This order shows as domestic. Country/region specified is United States-

This order shows as international. Country/region specified is Puerto Rico-

bigdeals.etc · ‎07-09-2020

@mam98031 wrote:
As I mentioned on the chat, my experience is that PR sales always appears as an international sale and has as far back as I can remember. However when I go to print my shipping label through Ebay, all is good. It is domestic shipping rates. I have never had international rates show up when going to purchase a label.

I think @coffeebean832 is referring to the possibility of paying international vs domestic MP fees, not postage rates. I'm still a total MP dud (don't know much), but I have a guess that MP will charge more fees for international sales versus domestic? Someone chime in here and confirm.

dtexley3 · ‎07-10-2020

Yes, I believe sellers would pay the extra 1.5% (??) for international sales. Not sure about the conversion rates, I would expect not, but when eBay fees are involved I wouldn't be surprised either way.

Member of the Grumpy Old Man crew

coffeebean832 · ‎07-10-2020

@bigdeals.etc wrote:
@mam98031 wrote:
As I mentioned on the chat, my experience is that PR sales always appears as an international sale and has as far back as I can remember. However when I go to print my shipping label through Ebay, all is good. It is domestic shipping rates. I have never had international rates show up when going to purchase a label.
I think @coffeebean832 is referring to the possibility of paying international vs domestic MP fees, not postage rates. I'm still a total MP dud (don't know much), but I have a guess that MP will charge more fees for international sales versus domestic? Someone chime in here and confirm.

Yes, exactly. Fees are higher for international sales.

eBay has been mis-handling US territories this way for years but it never mattered much before now.

rustyfan32 · ‎07-10-2020

My guess is that eBay has this redundancy because back when PR wasn’t a US territory, ebay only had PR listed as international. And when it became a US territory, in 1917, ebay added the option for PR as domestic and forgot to remove it from international. 🙂

This has to be sarcasm.. There was an eBay in 1917? And the correct date in 1898 after the U.S defeated Spain in the Spanish-American war. But the core issue is correct in term of political powers PR is part of the US, but for other things, like the Olympics, it is not.

selecttech · ‎07-10-2020

I will never sell one more thing there again.

Constantly adjusting, I mean constantly, the addresses and then receive INR claims and messages that it wasn't received.

Done. Cut PR out of our shipping template altogether. Not worth the time representing, looking up delivered orders, and the back and forth messages as a result. And then the fees for the cherry on top.

dtexley3 · ‎07-10-2020

@dtexley3 wrote:
This issue has been present for YEARS, for YEARS, it's been reported multiple times for YEARS. If the buyer has Puerto Rico for the country it defaults to an international shipment and nothing the seller can do will change that.

eBay simply needs to remove Puerto Rico from the list of valid country names and the issue would vanish. Easy fix, not expecting to happen.

After this rolling around in the back of my tired old brain I realized it's not quite a simple as just removing PR from the list of international destinations, though that's what should have happened several years ago.

They also would need to refuse to allow a buyer to pay for their order until they corrected their addresses to use the correct "state" code of "PR" and country code of "USA".

But still it's a pretty simple ask compared to some of the larger changes eBay has done.

Member of the Grumpy Old Man crew

brian@ebay · ‎07-10-2020

@coffeebean832 wrote:

I asked a few questions about Puerto Rico in today's chat-https://community.ebay.com/t5/Weekly-Chat-with-eBay-Staff/Community-Chat-July-8-1-00-pm-PT-General-T....

I looked at my last couple orders more closely and can see what I think might be causing the issue from my first question. I wanted to get you this additional info in case it helps with getting this sorted out.

@Anonymous brian@ebay tyler@ebay

This order shows as domestic. Country/region specified is United States-

This order shows as international. Country/region specified is Puerto Rico-

Thanks for these examples @coffeebean832! Would you mind emailing me the item numbers so I can provide them in my report to our tech team?

Brian,
Community Team

bigdeals.etc · ‎07-10-2020

I will say this though. Despite this obvious discrepancy (I wouldn't call it a glitch because it was intentional), how ebay displays the US territory is dependent on how the buyer entered it in the first place.

I sell to PR and other territories quite often, so far NONE have been displayed as international... a few times a day. And I'm proud to admit that this means these buyers are geographically smarter than the ebay development team. Let's hope none of the these ebay employees are from PR descent.

coffeebean832 · ‎07-10-2020

Brian- I sent you a list of 20 sales covering a few different US territories. Let me know if you need anything else.

bigdeals.etc · ‎07-10-2020

A seller friend of mine made a very good point about this.

"For UPS and Fed Ex, it's considered international and PR is the country, not US. That's where some of the confusion comes in, especially why people enter that as a country if they buy elsewhere that ships UPS or fed ex."

My guess is that those two companies intentionally want to charge more to ship to those territories and this is how they choose to do it.

coffeebean832 · ‎07-10-2020

Interesting. And USPS via Stamps.com will kick those out as invalid.

Any sale to a territory that appears on eBay as domestic with the territory as the state and the US as the country is fine. Any sale that appears as international with the full spelled out territory as both the state and the country get that big red X on Stamps.com when it goes through their USPS address verification software.

brian@ebay · ‎07-10-2020

@coffeebean832 wrote:

Brian- I sent you a list of 20 sales covering a few different US territories. Let me know if you need anything else.

Thanks @coffeebean832! I'm going to send this over to the right team for review 🙂

Brian,
Community Team

slippinjimmy · ‎07-10-2020

@bigdeals.etc wrote:
@mam98031 wrote:
As I mentioned on the chat, my experience is that PR sales always appears as an international sale and has as far back as I can remember. However when I go to print my shipping label through Ebay, all is good. It is domestic shipping rates. I have never had international rates show up when going to purchase a label.
I think @coffeebean832 is referring to the possibility of paying international vs domestic MP fees, not postage rates. I'm still a total MP dud (don't know much), but I have a guess that MP will charge more fees for international sales versus domestic? Someone chime in here and confirm.

Yes eBay will charge a higher fee for sales to non-US buyers, just like PayPal and I think (not 100% sure) the rate is actually slightly lower through eBay than through PayPal.

As far as fees for PR buyers, the extra fees for international are based on a) the country of registration of the buyer AND b) the form of payment used (US vs Non-US credit card).

PR buyers are registered in the US and in general will use a US issued credit card for payment so domestic fees will apply regardless of how messed up the address info is that is posted by the buyer.

The root cause of all this confusion is that from Day One eBay was set up to accept US address formatting only, there never was any consideration for users from other countries where address formats are different.

Because of this long standing issue I have to "fix" many of my International sales so that they comply with local addressing standards. Fortunately the SixBit software I use includes software that converts most International addresses automatically but I still need to fix some, especially Asian ones. Because the input screen are set up for the US many foreign buyers botch things when they register as their are fields that are meaningless to them and some fields that are important don't even exist.

A couple of examples:

In France the recipient name is Last Name, First Name (eBay can't format this correctly).

In all of the EU the Post Code / City Name format is "111111 City" but eBay converts these to "City 111111", automated postal scanning equipment can't deal with that format properly.

In the USA, State is an important component of the address, It's the same in Canada and Australia but for most of the rest of the world Province or State are not used at all.

It's always been my feeling that these issues at least partially result from Pitney-Bowes involvement and/or the thinking that the US way is the only way giving no consideration to the methods used by other countries.

"Zip Code" is strictly a US thing, in fact "Zip Code" is a trademark owned by USPS. In Canada the equivalent is "Postal Code" and the generic name used by the Universal Postal Union is "Post Code".

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep

slippinjimmy · ‎07-10-2020

@bigdeals.etc wrote:
I will say this though. Despite this obvious discrepancy (I wouldn't call it a glitch because it was intentional), how ebay displays the US territory is dependent on how the buyer entered it in the first place.

I sell to PR and other territories quite often, so far NONE have been displayed as international... a few times a day. And I'm proud to admit that this means these buyers are geographically smarter than the ebay development team. Let's hope none of the these ebay employees are from PR descent.

YES!!!!

The problem could be rectified is eBay utilized "smart" data input screens that I see in other places. Screens that would adjust based on the input into previous fields.

It would also help if eBay would verify addresses as valid at the time of input but they don't. You can open an eBay account and input all kinds of bad info and eBay accepts it. It should not be possible to enter invalid info but you can. I once registered an account using completely bogus info that would never pass a USPS address checker but eBay accepted it all.

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep

bigdeals.etc · ‎07-10-2020

@slippinjimmy wrote:
It would also help if eBay would verify addresses as valid at the time of input but they don't. You can open an eBay account and input all kinds of bad info and eBay accepts it. It should not be possible to enter invalid info but you can. I once registered an account using completely bogus info that would never pass a USPS address checker but eBay accepted it all.

Yea I know huh! I've complained about this to ebay for eons and was only met with shrugs. This would solve some of the issues mentioned in this thread as well as some others not mentioned. I hate the ones where you would go to ebay postage labels and there's that red text error telling you that the address needs to be amended because it is currently invalid. Why was the buyer able to enter it in the first place if ebay already knew it was invalid? Ebay already has a system to catch invalid addresses... push it up earlier to when the buyer enters the address. You don't even have to create anything new.

Isn't taking preventative measures generally easier than dealing with damage control? I know it is in this case. I hear it all the time when I talk with CS in regards to issues of invalid/incorrect buyer provided shipping addresses. They always say something like "The only responsibility buyers have is to provide a valid shipping address." If that's true, then truly hold them responsible from the get go. Thoughts brian@ebay ?