I'm fed up with dealing with ebay's useless virtual assistant for support, and while I finally was able to send an email to support, I thought I might (vent) post here too in case anyone has any tips or suggestions.
TLDR: I'm an American expat living in Japan and want to set up an ebay account to sell my extra Japanese pokemon cards. Currently unable to proceed past step 3 in the process for creating Seller Managed Payments. It asks for a credit card for selling costs, then keeps giving me this error: "Please ensure that the billing address you entered matches the address on the card."
Below is a copy of the email I sent to support.
start of email
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I am trying to set up Seller Managed Payments.
I followed and completed the steps through to creating and linking a payoneer account.
I am now on step 3 Add your financial info, where it asks me to add a credit card for selling costs.
I keep getting the following error:
"Please ensure that the billing address you entered matches the address on the card."
The address I entered is correct. I even verified with my credit card company as to the exact billing address they have on file for my account. The single minor discrepancy I can find is that my credit card billing address has the state listed as PA, but your form only has a drop-down area for the state with the state names spelled out fully. (i.e. I am only able to choose Pennsylvania, rather than PA)
Why am I getting this error? Is it because I am creating this ebay account in Japan, and the address associated with the EBAY account is Japanese, but I am trying to use one of my USA credit cards for this step? I am an American citizen living in Japan, and if I am eventually able to create this ebay seller account I will be selling from Japan. However, I do not have a Japanese credit card. I only have USA based credit cards.
How is this system determining what the billing address for this card is supposed to be? There is no indication as to what portion of the address I have inputted is being flagged as a mismatch. I am getting no useful feedback from the interface as to what I can do to even try to resolve the error.
Also I am confused by the below segment of text that is displayed when I got to step 3 of this process.
"We need a card on file in case you have outstanding amounts owed to eBay and your funds are insufficient. The credit card you add for selling costs should match your payout currency to avoid the possibility of additional fees."
What does "should match your payout currency" refer to? Ebay is a US based site, so wouldn't the payout currency be in USD? I'm trying to set up this account for the first time; how would I know what the payout currency will be? Where can I find that information? Or is this actually a vague clue that the system is trying to compare the BILLING address for my USA credit card to the JAPANESE RESIDENTIAL address I created the ebay account with?
Ultimately, I just want to know what I need to do in order to actually start selling items. I am quite frustrated that the system allowed me to spend hours creating draft listings, only to reach this bottleneck when I tried to make one of the drafts live. If the answer to this ends up being that I must have a Japanese credit card, it's going to be infuriating to think of all the time I wasted taking photos of items and creating all the draft listings.
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end of email
There are so many aspects of this whole process that I find flat out stupid, but two points got me actively angry.
The first being creating and linking a payoneer account happening before I got to my current roadblock. If my current roadblock ends up meaning I can't create a seller account, that creates more work for me because I will have to go cancel the useless new payoneer account I created.
(especially mad about that since I had to give them my US social security number as part of the verification process. I didn't even want to do that, but the only verification options for if I selected Japan for the country were a Japanese driver's license which I don't have, or a Japanese passport, which I also don't have)
The second point is more on payoneer rather than ebay, but right at the end of account creation there are two items you have to click agree to. 1 - TOS, 2 - Pricing and Fees. Well the link for the pricing and fees just redirects to a broken 404 page.
(wow, really inspires me to agree to their secret pricing and fees policy as well as soothe my inherent unease at giving out my social security number /sarcasm)
Lastly, albeit on a minor annoyance level, as a software engineer with about 5yrs experience in e-commerce, there were so many garbage aspects of the UI/UX that made me want to scream.
addendum:
Wow. Tried to post this and got the below two errors
"Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and submit the message when you are satisfied."
and
"Correct the highlighted errors and try again."
Add another point for garbage UI/UX, since when I looked through my post NOTHING was highlighted.
I found the single (I think?) spot that was changed. I guess one of the words I used was too spicy because it was changed to a written version of an audio bleep of a curse word -> * * b l e e p * *
I'm pretty sure that was the only change. I don't like that I can't see what I originally wrote to confirm whether or not my words aren't being twisted, or flat out stuff I didn't say being inserted.
