@popblox wrote:
That's what this feels like. Either eBay programmers went to Cornpone's Codin' Akademy, or they're being forced to implement something they know is horrendous and they're crying themselves to sleep at night.
Ummm... I don't think they care that much about it... 😉
A lot of this dismal coding development goes unseen, and no one from eBay wants to talk about it, let alone take responsibility for whatever this new form is trying to do, but there are some clues from the past that suggest that it's either offshore programming (most likely from Europe), or it at least originated at other eBay websites elsewhere, followed by a later attempt to adapt it for U.S. use.
When the current Shipping form was in its earliest test form here, it was a bizarre hybrid of American and British terminology (such as text referring to GBP instead of dollars), and someone from eBay finally acknowledged that it had been developed in the UK, and some details were missed when bringing it over to ebay.com.
The European influence continues to this day, such as in the Shipping email you receive when you've purchased your label. In past years, it was a full record of what got sold and where it went, but then it went through a slash-and-burn revision that removed practically all the relevant data. After lengthy complaints about the fact that the message had no indication of which label for which product had been purchased, and no name or address of the person receiving it, that data was quietly and mostly restored in January of 2021.
To this day it's not entirely complete, as the address is rendered in European style, where the postal code (their version of a ZIP code) precedes the City name, and the State abbreviation is nowhere to be seen because that's a U.S.-specific address element. Thus your label address is shown in the message as something like
John Smith
123 Main Street
98765-4321 Springfield
United States
This has been reported more than once, but no one has managed to find a solution. It really should not be this difficult to fix something that obvious, but it's been 16 months now with no correction. This is why every major revision that comes along causes heart palpitations among long-time sellers. They are quick to announce but slow to fix.
