Hey everyone! We've received a response from our Shipping team regarding excluded Countries when shipping with EIS:
"After a seller has been migrated to EIS, we continue to respect any country exclusions the seller has applied to their listing"
Elizabeth,
Yes I’m using eBay standard because EIS doesn’t work for sneakers. I was migrated over to EIS as I was using GSP.
Maybe Elizabeth can bump this one up to the tech team. It appears nothing may have been converted to EIS when you were transitioned I looked at a T-shirt you have posted and it also did not convert.
elizabeth@ebay can you PLEASE help me? I started a thread about this but didn't get any helpful responses, so then I contacted ebay for business. Let me just copy/paste what I asked and what 'Hailey' replied, that will save some time.
I am on Ebay International Shipping, which has been fine so far. But a buyer has asked if I ship to Taiwan so I checked and Taiwan is not on the 'Ships to' list for this item, nor is it on the 'Excluded' list. In fact, the vast majority of countries in the world are not on either list! So I don't know what to say to this buyer. But also, if for some reason this item cannot be shipped to most countries, why is that? It's not because it's an auction (other auction listings I have running show the very long list of countries they will ship to), nor is it the category (I have other 'Collections and lots' in vintage jewelry and they have the long country list). So is there just something in the title or description that makes it ineligible to most countries??? Thisis for item 125831122131 Thanks to lotzofuniquegoodies I found the listing and you are correct there is a LOT of disparity between your listings as far as the countries the item will ship to. This seems to be a MAJOR problem with the sub-contractor that is doing the conversion from GSP to EIS and it is causing some major headaches for multiple sellers based on the postings on this forum.
Then she replied:
We pulled up your account and listing and it looks like this listing is set up with eBay International Shipping. For any countries that aren't showing on the ship to list, that means it can't be shipped there. There are many reasons why an item may be restricted, so the option for us to narrow it down to one specific reason won't be available. It could be due to the material it's made out of, the wording in the title, and many other reasons. All eligible ship to countries will be listed for a qualifying buyer to purchase. ~Hailey CS is not going to know the answer to this question in most cases since eBay is not directly operating the EIS nor are they handling the transition from GSP to EIS. Only the Chinese based company that eBay has contracted with to run EIS is going to be able to diagnose those technical issues. One of the major issues may be that this is not a tried and true company like Pitney Bowes was with the GSP.
So if I understand right, only the program bots "know" what is or isn't restricted; no human at Ebay has any way to look it up? Mind you I am talking about THE MAJORITY of countries, and I will be selling lots exactly like this, sold plenty of them all over the world when I was on the GSP. I NEED to know what words or item specifics trigger such a drastic restriction. You are probably correct in your assumption and it may be difficult to get the answers to those questions unless eBay provides a technical support interface to the sub contractor.
That ^ is my #1 concern, but now that I think about it, why can this buyer in Taiwan (I verified their location via their account) even SEE my listing, if it is not eligible for EIS to Taiwan, and I didn't add any other international shipping options? And what happens if someone in an ineligible country bids and wins, or BIN the item? The buyer in Taiwan sees the item probably since you sell worldwide but if you not in the shipping area there is a note regarding the shipping since you are in the EIS program. I guess eBay and the sub-contractor expect the buyer and seller to work out alternative shipping options.
@dbfolks166mt wrote:elizabeth@ebay can you PLEASE help me? I started a thread about this but didn't get any helpful responses, so then I contacted ebay for business. Let me just copy/paste what I asked and what 'Hailey' replied, that will save some time.
I am on Ebay International Shipping, which has been fine so far. But a buyer has asked if I ship to Taiwan so I checked and Taiwan is not on the 'Ships to' list for this item, nor is it on the 'Excluded' list. In fact, the vast majority of countries in the world are not on either list! So I don't know what to say to this buyer. But also, if for some reason this item cannot be shipped to most countries, why is that? It's not because it's an auction (other auction listings I have running show the very long list of countries they will ship to), nor is it the category (I have other 'Collections and lots' in vintage jewelry and they have the long country list). So is there just something in the title or description that makes it ineligible to most countries??? Thisis for item 125831122131 Thanks to lotzofuniquegoodies I found the listing and you are correct there is a LOT of disparity between your listings as far as the countries the item will ship to. This seems to be a MAJOR problem with the sub-contractor that is doing the conversion from GSP to EIS and it is causing some major headaches for multiple sellers based on the postings on this forum.
Then she replied:We pulled up your account and listing and it looks like this listing is set up with eBay International Shipping. For any countries that aren't showing on the ship to list, that means it can't be shipped there. There are many reasons why an item may be restricted, so the option for us to narrow it down to one specific reason won't be available. It could be due to the material it's made out of, the wording in the title, and many other reasons. All eligible ship to countries will be listed for a qualifying buyer to purchase. ~Hailey CS is not going to know the answer to this question in most cases since eBay is not directly operating the EIS nor are they handling the transition from GSP to EIS. Only the Chinese based company that eBay has contracted with to run EIS is going to be able to diagnose those technical issues. One of the major issues may be that this is not a tried and true company like Pitney Bowes was with the GSP.
So if I understand right, only the program bots "know" what is or isn't restricted; no human at Ebay has any way to look it up? Mind you I am talking about THE MAJORITY of countries, and I will be selling lots exactly like this, sold plenty of them all over the world when I was on the GSP. I NEED to know what words or item specifics trigger such a drastic restriction. You are probably correct in your assumption and it may be difficult to get the answers to those questions unless eBay provides a technical support interface to the sub contractor.
That ^ is my #1 concern, but now that I think about it, why can this buyer in Taiwan (I verified their location via their account) even SEE my listing, if it is not eligible for EIS to Taiwan, and I didn't add any other international shipping options? And what happens if someone in an ineligible country bids and wins, or BIN the item? The buyer in Taiwan sees the item probably since you sell worldwide but if you not in the shipping area there is a note regarding the shipping since you are in the EIS program. I guess eBay and the sub-contractor expect the buyer and seller to work out alternative shipping options.
I'm not sure where in the process things kick in but there has always been an issue with the buyer when they search changing the location they are located in. All a foreign buyer has to do is show a US zipcode and then the system believes they are located in the USA. When they purchase does the system then get confused realizing they are located elsewhere. Who knows. Buyers routinely report they are unable to pay after the fact so the total issue is difficult to diagnose.
Same goes for sending best offers. If a buyer changes their ship to location( or even add the item to their watch list) during a search they show the seller gets a notice of a new watcher. They (the seller) because they can't see feedback they have no idea who the buyer is and where they are located.
Last part of this mess is many buyers (especially in the olden days of eBay) registered on dot com. They could have been in Canada/USA or International. Now when a Canadian buyer(registered on dot com) buys from a Canadian seller the purchase is treated like an International sale. Even though in principle it isn't. Buyers/Sellers never bothered to re-register because they have no idea what grief it might or might not cause. Location, Location, Location matters until it doesn't because the system can't interpret anything accurately.
-Lotz
PS. Your notation about sellers and buyers working things out when a sale goes through that shouldn't have sounds like a MAJOR nightmare for both parties. Like having no way(within ebay) to re-bill a customer when item arrives a day or 5 when buyer says late because eBays said so.
Very interesting. So, before I answer your question, read what 'Paige' replied when I asked follow-up questions on EFB (this would be thread message 25, above ^). I'll give you some time ......
..... (LOL) okay you see how she specifies the ".com" aspect? That may be what @lotzofuniquegoodies was talking about. So, I really don't know but maybe what you're saying about my account preferences is totally trumped by whether the buyer is using the website or the app (or which of those they used to set up their account). But to answer your question, yes I have the block checked regarding countries I don't ship to. See below.
I almost believe those settings are like knobs on a Fisher Price toy, as in, they don't actually do diddly squat. Note how I have the 'buyers who are currently winning or have bought 2 items in the past 10 days' thing checked? I don't even know why I checked that because right now it doesn't make sense to me. I mean I guess the purpose would be to avoid a chain reaction of badness if the buyer is a deadbeat or planning a CC chargeback scam or something, but it's much more likely they are just someone who really likes my stuff, so setting up a block against them could just kill a potentially good repeat buyer relationship! And I'm also not sure how it *supposedly works but incidentally the lady who won THIS^ auction had already won a similar one two days prior, and had that sitting in her shopping cart, along with a BIN bracelet, while seeing if she could win this other one too, for combined shipping (she graciously wrote to me after winning the first one to let me know that's why she was waiting to pay -what a refreshing rarity that is, and I'm going to throw in some surprise bonus goodies into her box, better believe it). Anyway what I'm saying is, the block apparently didn't stop HER from winning/buying more than 2 items within 10 days, but then I don't know if this would count because she just had Lot#1 and the bracelet in her shopping cart. Anyway, I'm gonna go un-check that stupid block now before I forget.
Ughhh .... I'm so stupid, I just now looked at that list again and there's the sub-requirement on that block, that it only pertains to people with a < 3 feedback score. Okay, that makes sense and I do want it then. LOL. Forgive me, I'm naturally blonde.
@dbfolks166mt wrote:Gotta love the eBay search engine at times. I cannot find a listing for item 125831122131
Sorry about that. The auction still had 3 days left to go when this all started (the Taiwanese buyer contacting me), but since then it closed, which I see Lotz clarified for you. To be honest I'm fairly disappointed with the winning bid, considering the item had an unprecedented (for me) 104 watchers!!! So I'm wondering, how many of those were people who wanted it but couldn't bid, because of where they live??? As I said in my EFB message, these mixed jewelry lots are my bread and butter, and VERY FEW countries were blocked under the GSP. It's bad enough that Russia and Ukraine are out of the picture now, because they were among my top buyers before -them there folks just love old jewelry and put their money where their mouths are! I sure miss them.
Sorry you are in this situation but eBay and the EIS sub-contractor are doing a horrific job with this transition. It appears to be creating a log of problems for the limited number of sellers that have been transitioned over, how many ever that happens to be.
Apparently not only are they having problems with the key word algorithm that is setting the countries, for the seller, with regards to which individual items can be shipped to which countries but they are putting the following stupid message into the listing if a country is not eligible.
As more and more sellers are transitioned or enrolled it will be interesting to see if sellers start getting multiple emails and messages about alterative shipping options when the seller may have no idea what the buyer is talking about. A seller may have different shipping exclusions for every individual listing they have or that they will create.
