Ebay's new contact information policy is insane!

[rabidprototypes]

We noticed that your listings include contact information. We want to let you know that starting October 2017, you’ll no longer be allowed to share contact information on item descriptions, images, or eBay stores. To help you communicate with buyers, we’ve launched a new feature that allows them to call you after your sale.

I sell electronics that require DOCUMENTATION and DRIVERS. These are things my customers can only get from my website!

Copy the documentation into my listings you say?  Sure, I could overwhelm my customer with too much information before they purchase the product, scaring them away because they think it'll be too complicated for them or won't work because of all the troubleshooting info. And I could maintain two copies of said documentation for all my products on seperate websites with no way to automate it. But that stil wouldn't solve the problem of a driver being required, and my inability to provide a link for them to download it on the listing!

I suppose I could print up business cards with my web address and include them with every product shipped, but that is a ridiculous waste of paper and now my customer has to enter the URL manually, and I can't send them directly to the product page!

And what about products which have a URL printed on them or their packaging? Will ebay pull down every listing for a video card or motherboard with the URL of the company that designed it emblazoned upon it, or listings that include a photo of the side of the box with the specs and the company URL?

As for the suggestion that I provide a phone number for support, that's even more crazy!

I'm a small business. And the only employee is ME. I barely have time to provide support via email which I can do AT MY LEISURE. If I allowed my customers to call me I would be stuck on the phone with them for hours every day. Clearly whatever suit came up with this brilliant idea doesn't have to answer support calls from ebay customers himself!

In fact, ebay should know better than to suggest this, because these days businesses do everything they can to avoid having the customer call them because the people running them know it's extremely expensive to have a real live person to provide technical support over the phone! It is much cheaper to direct the customer to an automated system online to get support. Even email is too costly for the bean counters, and usually you will only be directed to an actual representative if you've exhausted all the automated support options!

[phcd1]

Most sellers that have contact information in their listings are trolling for "off site" transactions and eBay knows this. Just include the instructions with the item when you ship it.

[18704d]

"Sure, I could overwhelm my customer with too much information before they purchase the product, scaring them away because they think it'll be too complicated for them or won't work because of all the troubleshooting info.

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Scaring them?

I guess you can either overwhelm them before or after the sale.

I'd rather my buyers knew what they were getting into when reading the listing...

instead of being surprised later.

jmtcw,

Lynn

[rabidprototypes]

I'd rather my buyers knew what they were getting into when reading the listing... instead of being surprised later.

I see. So when you sell a car, you think you should mention what to do in case of an oil leak, or the check engine light coming on, or the radiator overheating, or the brakes squealing, etc, etc...

That SURELY will not scare away customers who think you are providing this information because a bunch of things are horribly wrong with the vehicle you're selling. No, your customers are all rational and logical human beings who will understand you are simply being helpful by trying to cover all bases in case something DOES go wrong, and that they needen't worry because the chances of that happening to them are incredibly slim!

Anyway, you're missing the point here. The point is I can't provide a link for my customers to download the drivers they need to use my products. Everything else is a secondardy concern.

[*eponymous*]

Anyway, you're missing the point here. The point is I can't provide a link for my customers to download the drivers they need to use my products. Everything else is a secondardy concern.

So burn a CD and include it in the package.  In light of being able to pull contact information for almost 20 years, this new policy of providing a phone number ONLY IF THE SELLER ELECTS TO DO SO is a non-issue.

[pantlandia]

Mountain meet molehill.

[coolections]

You are overthinking the whole process. Sell your item and include a business card with the item. No need for a buyer to know the link to the website prior to the purchase.

[rabidprototypes]

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@*eponymous* wrote:

So burn a CD and include it in the package.

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LOL. Most laptops and PCs these days don't even have an optical media drive!

Also on a $15 board, a $2 optical disc would be a significant cost burden. Those discs also took forever to write and failed half the time!

These days, 95% of the time there is no CD in the box when you buy a piece of hardware and all the drivers must be downloaded. Even if you buy something like Windows these days that absolutely needs a way to install it without an internet connection it will come on a USB stick. And that would be an even greater cost burden than a CD would be.

[luckythewinner]

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I suppose I could print up business cards with my web address and include them with every product shipped, but that is a ridiculous waste of paper and now my customer has to enter the URL manually, and I can't send them directly to the product page!

There is absolutely no need to send a business card in the package, because if they paid by PayPal you have their email address and can communicate with them after the sale that way.

I'm a small business. And the only employee is ME. I barely have time to provide support via email which I can do AT MY LEISURE. If I allowed my customers to call me I would be stuck on the phone with them for hours every day. 

You are not required to give out your phone number; that is just an option available to you. Again, once they have paid you then you will have their email address and can communicate directly with them.  

And what about products which have a URL printed on them or their packaging? Will ebay pull down every listing for a video card or motherboard with the URL of the company that designed it emblazoned upon it, or listings that include a photo of the side of the box with the specs and the company URL?

My guess? No, they won't. But it's an amusing and inventive idea to suggest they will.

[18704d]

"I see. So when you sell a car, you think you should mention what to do in case of an oil leak, or the check engine light coming on, or the radiator overheating, or the brakes squealing, etc, etc..."

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Are you trying to show your buyers each and every possible thing that can ever go wrong with your item, for it's entire useful life?

Or simply trying to provide them enough useful information, to set up and use your product?

?

Lynn

[myangelandmyprincess]

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@rabidprototypes wrote:

I'd rather my buyers knew what they were getting into when reading the listing... instead of being surprised later.

I see. So when you sell a car, you think you should mention what to do in case of an oil leak, or the check engine light coming on, or the radiator overheating, or the brakes squealing, etc, etc...

That SURELY will not scare away customers who think you are providing this information because a bunch of things are horribly wrong with the vehicle you're selling. No, your customers are all rational and logical human beings who will understand you are simply being helpful by trying to cover all bases in case something DOES go wrong, and that they needen't worry because the chances of that happening to them are incredibly slim!

Anyway, you're missing the point here. The point is I can't provide a link for my customers to download the drivers they need to use my products. Everything else is a secondardy concern.

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When they pay with PayPal you get their email address send the links to needed drivers there after the sale 

[galenarizona]

FYI - From a facebook page I follow regarding this email which I got as well and do NOT have any contact info in my listings:

Policy Alert - Be careful about clicking any links in emails that appear to be from eBay with the subject "Important changes to our contact information policy". I received an email today that appeared to be from eBay stating I have contact information in my listings. I do not and it was a phishing email. I called eBay spoke with Trust and Safety and they said they didn't send it. The rep told me you can know if an email is from eBay - address must be from - ..."@ebay.com" in the from box. This is the 2nd email I've received that "appears" to be from eBay in the last 2 weeks, but ISN'T. The rep told me they would appreciate having any eBay phishing emails forwarded to them at - spoof@ebay.com

[nowthatsjustducky]

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@rabidprototypes wrote:

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Also on a $15 board, a $2 optical disc would be a significant cost burden. Those discs also took forever to write and failed half the time!

These days, 95% of the time there is no CD in the box when you buy a piece of hardware and all the drivers must be downloaded. Even if you buy something like Windows these days that absolutely needs a way to install it without an internet connection it will come on a USB stick. And that would be an even greater cost burden than a CD would be.

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Who the heck pays $2 for a blank CD?  We are well into the 21st Century now where blank optical media is down to pennies per disc.  $2 is late 90s prices.

[rabidprototypes]

You're right, it's the 21st century, and as such I haven't bought a CD-R, or had a working CD drive in my PC in like ten years, so maybe my information is slightly out of date, but I checked Amazon and it's still $0.20 a disc.

And in any case, it takes so long to burn CDs that the idea of burning a CD to include with every board I ship out is absurd. I could have a few thousand pressed but... no.  Not for a circuit board that sells for $20 that I make maybe $7 in profit on. Not when few if any customers will actually use that CD. And not when by the time I get to the bottom of that stack of a thousand CDs, the drivers will be two to three years out of date.

This shoudn't even be a discussion. The idea of putting drivers on CDs in this day and age is ridiculous.

And speaking of ridiculous, when I owned a macbook that did have an optical drive, I couldn't even use the few CDs I did get with newly purchased hardware like external drives, because they always came on those tiny CDs which the automatic loading mechanism in the macbook couldn't handle,  so I would end up having to download the drivers anyway!

[ambrosius822]

I have the same problem. We have NO links in our listings but our labels are another story. At this point my tech support is having to DUPLICATE 151 item's photos in order to then BLUR OUT the bottoms of all of the labels, because that is the ONLY place where links are showing in the listings. ON OUR LABELS. I have flipped over the packages in about half of the listings making us look incredibly non professional but they are STILL Saying that I have links. We've done the control F for finding either the @ or .com or .net & NOTHING comes up, so the ONLY thing that we can think of is that somehow they've documentaized our photos & are getting the links off of that.
I've spent a WEEK, going in & deleting all of the underlines in all of the listings which is RIDICULOUS & yet, between that & flipping some of the packages, we've gone down from over HALF of our best sellers being on the list to less than 19, but I am NOT going to look like an idiot selling product on eBay because they can't keep their mitts off of my labels.
We're actually going in & doings a DUPLICATE of all of the photo's & blurring out the bottom half of them, but I feel that that's REALLY overkill.