07-11-2019 08:04 AM
I sold an item to a customer who has PR (Puerto Rico) listed as their state and country. Neither eBay nor PayPal will let me generate a shipping label. I messaged the buyer a few days ago but haven't heard back. Does anyone know how I can change the country? It's populating as a domestic item.
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07-11-2019 10:35 AM
Solution that worked for me for anyone coming here with the same issue:
In PayPal, I selected 'Calculate Shipping'. It returned an error but it also gave me an Edit option for the customer address that wasn't there previously. I was able to then select Edit and change the country to US. The label was then successfully printed.
07-11-2019 08:09 AM
Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory..Puerto Rico is domestic USPS mail.
07-11-2019 08:13 AM
@bonjourami wrote:Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory..Puerto Rico is domestic USPS mail.
Yes, I am aware, all the more reason "PR" shouldn't be listed in the country field on their shipping instructions. When I click 'Purchase and print label' in eBay, the button grays out and I get returned no error. However, in PayPal, I receive a message that reads, "Sorry, the selected country or region is not supported." This is what's leading me to believe the buyer's country selection is causing the issue. I'd like to edit that if possible to see if I can rectify the problem, particularly since the buyer isn't the most responsive.
07-11-2019 08:49 AM
07-11-2019 08:57 AM - edited 07-11-2019 09:00 AM
Unfortunately, not everybody on the other side of the world, who does programming, know that Puerto Rico is merely a zipcode away.
07-11-2019 09:01 AM
True enough/
07-11-2019 09:09 AM - edited 07-11-2019 09:11 AM
Actually we've ran into this problem in Bulk Printing before.
Worse still is it stalled our whole bulk shipping process because this ONE bad label kept us from doing anything at all... Or at least that's the way I recall it...
No, Paypal is of no help here.
The only way we were able to print this label is to exit bulk labels, then select it individually out of the SOLD Await shipment list and individually purchase and print its very own label FIRST, then we were able to print/ship the rest of the items, granted the PR item never made it onto our SCAN sheet because of that.
07-11-2019 10:35 AM
Solution that worked for me for anyone coming here with the same issue:
In PayPal, I selected 'Calculate Shipping'. It returned an error but it also gave me an Edit option for the customer address that wasn't there previously. I was able to then select Edit and change the country to US. The label was then successfully printed.
07-11-2019 01:44 PM
07-12-2019 06:44 AM
Thank you for the work around - the PayPay edit option worked for our PR label today.
It looks like eBay is finally trying to fix the Customs form that got applied to PR addresses in the spring of 2017. We have mentioned this many times to CS that even though it required the fields for the Customs form it printed as a standard USA label and that USPS does not require a Customs form to territories.
We had always gone to PayPal to print whenever a PR customer put in USA for country but did not know of this work around to be able to edit the customers addy that put PR as the country - Much appreciated as the only other options would be to refund purchase or hand label and pay the extra counter charges at the post office.
07-12-2019 07:21 AM
@bluestardiecast wrote:Thank you for the work around - the PayPay edit option worked for our PR label today.
I can confirm that the other workaround of changing "new_label" to "back_to_classic" in the URL will also work, as it then brings up the "classic" Shipping form which is able to deal with this bug.
I had previously thought that this PR-as-a-country error was somehow created by the buyers when they set up their Ship To address, but it seemed like a weird error for someone who actually lives there to be making. Perhaps the root error for all this mess is that a programmer somewhere thought that Puerto Rico was another country (i.e. one that does not use the domestic US Postal System), and thus "PR" for "Puerto Rico" exists as a choice in the list of Country values. (It can be seen as a choice in more than one location in the lists of countries that you can exclude from selling/shipping to.)
A mailing address with "PR" in the Country field, when passed to the "classic" Shipping form, will trigger a unnecessary Customs form to be completed after the main Shipping form is finished. (In the classic form, you can tell when it's about to bring up a Customs form because the Blue button at lower right will read "Continue" instead of "Purchase postage.") As the Customs form is not actually required for domestic shipping to Puerto Rico, the classic form never actually passes it on for printing, using the domestic label template instead of the international Customs/address form template when printing the recipient's package label.
In comparison, the "new" form seems completely confounded by a Country field value of "PR," and simply hangs.
@Anonymous, can you please just give us a wave or something to let us know that this information will reach the programmer(s) who need to fix this? It looks like we users have come a long way in debugging the possible root problem as well as its side-effects, symptoms and available workarounds (thanks to @berserkerplanet ), so it would be helpful to know that our work is not in vain here. Thanks!
07-12-2019 10:27 AM
07-12-2019 10:54 AM
@berserkerplanet wrote:
@a_c_green
Did you try the "country field edit enable" hack (manually or via the bookmarklet) I posted in the other thread referenced above? (I was hoping you would since you have a guinea pig sale and the chops to implement and evaluate efficacy)
I have not, but I suppose I should give it the ol' college try, as my Puerto Rican buyer returned just last night to make another purchase which is pending now, so I do seem to have everything necessary for testing at the moment.
@berserkerplanet wrote:
(Very nice summation of the issue BTW)
Thanks , though I do find it kind of frustrating to do all this testing and writeup that shouldn't be necessary, then send it in and nothing... happens...
07-12-2019 11:15 AM - edited 07-12-2019 11:20 AM
@berserkerplanet wrote:
Did you try the "country field edit enable" hack (manually or via the bookmarklet) I posted in the other thread referenced above? (I was hoping you would since you have a guinea pig sale and the chops to implement and evaluate efficacy)
Okay, working in the current Chrome browser on a Windoze 10 box here, I was able to remove the Read Only attribute from the Country field and plug in "United States" in its place. Unfortunately (and I can't say that I was entirely surprised by this), when I attempted to Save this change, it returned "An unexpected error has occurred. Please try again." The browser's Console window shows a returned Error 500 (Internal Server Error) at that point.
While they're okay with letting a seller modify the buyer's address for whatever reason, changing the Country value is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, since that affects the process(es) to be spawned from the Shipping form, such as whether to go with domestic or international shipping labels. The fact that the buyer's Ship To address is already wrong at this point (showing "PR" instead of "United States" as the country) is not something that they want to allow to be corrected at this point in the proceedings. While you could conceivably cancel the whole thing as "Problem with Buyer's Address),
P.S. In case I didn't mention this before: it's only the "new" form that displays the buyer's Country as "PR". The same shipment viewed via the "classic" form shows his Country as "United States" instead. The field cannot be edited in either case. This suggests that it's not Buyer Error but eBay coding error.
07-12-2019 04:24 PM - edited 07-12-2019 04:26 PM
Thanks for trying the hack.
I ran into the server error also going back and forth from a starting United States country address too, but a reload of the label page and trying again seemed to work fine. I was able to change the buyer's address to PR country, and the label flow automatically changed the state to PR even though the zip code was still a SoCal zip.
Whether it would fly if I actually tried to purchase the label is unknown.
It appears that other than United States, only 2 character capitalized country abbreviations are allowed (PR, CA, MX, DE, etc) When one types US it autoexpands it to United States.
I was then able to change the SoCal buyer's address to Canada by typing CA in the country field (after using the bookmarklet to enable editing) leaving PR as the state, and the Socal zip code, and when I hit update, the new label flow gave me prices for 2lb via FCPIS, PMI, and PME to Canada that are 100% correct. Same thing for Mexico by changing it to MX.
The country field editing does work, at least as far as what I've mentioned goes. The failure you saw may be a browser issue, or a twitchy label flow issue (the flow seems to throws errors all the time, stale page, too many clicks on the update button, after changing dimensions, etc, and a reload/refresh of the page seems to clear the slate.
Using Firefox 52 here.