To start off, I'd like to reference a past post of mine - https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Caution-all-sellers-Check-your-service-metrics-Confirmed-eBay-... - In Feb we encountered a glitch where we were improperly given the Item Not Received - Service Metric penalty. As you could clearly see in the screenshot, we were below 1% and therefore not eligible for it. But as confirmed by eBay, we DID receive that penalty from Feb 1 to Mar 1. In the above example, eBay took no responsibility for the issue, and offered no resolution. They recognized it on their end as a penalty we didn't deserve, but said there's "no way to fix it" and basically to just wait it out until March 1st.
For the record, you can see the huge difference it made in our sales, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. EBay offered no re-compensation for our losses, of course.
Recent issues:
After that penalty finally expired, we began experiencing a new issue: Our handling time was being ignored, and all of our listings were being counted as 1 day handling time!
Here are some screenshots as an example:
As you could see above, our items were set to 10 day handling time, yet the customers were shown that it arrives in 4 days! Meaning it's counted as 1 day handling time, and 3 day shipping time!
This obviously caused many unhappy customers, as their side of eBay shows it's arriving in 4 days, when that's not even 50% of our handling time! And then we have to explain to them that it's an eBay glitch, while they have no reason to believe us as they can see nothing on eBay to indicate this. This hurts our reputation as a seller.
Then the problem gets worse, when 4 days pass and they open an Item Not Received case! For an item that hasn't even reached handling time yet!
I spoke to eBay at the time, first on the morning of March 18th, and they promised us that they would protect us, and would not hold us to anything that we did not have in our listings. I had mentioned to them that they usually don't help with service metrics. They had said to me while they typically do not, and that's basically what they communicate to customers by default, but in rare cases they will make exceptions when it's due to a site error.
But since then, it has been attempt after attempt, they keep saying they'll be removing them, and then they are NOT removed.
On May 11th, I spoke to someone in Escalations (and I have the SR# still) who said they will assist, and I went through dozens of cases with her. She did her best to be helpful, but it turns out they're STILL not removed.
This issue is confirmed by our last months Service Metric report (I edited to remove any personal information):
This report shows exactly what I've been describing. You can see it's CONFIRMED 10 or 15 day handling time. And eBay is allowing those INR cases to be opened against us before it has reached that handling time! This is not supposed to be allowed in the functionality of the eBay site!
We have evidence in eBay's own reports of this issue we're facing. Yet all of those marked in yellow are STILL being held against us.
This includes only the cases from the March and April review.
Since the review is in 5 days, I went through May to see what is about to be on the May review, and there's 22 more cases like this!
So I called eBay regarding this today, to follow up on the removal we discussed last month. As with all these new cases combined with the old ones, it's very likely we'll be high enough to get hit with the INR Service Metric penalty.
EBay CS had said today that same old message that they "can not remove Service Metrics" and that they can only try to contact the IT team to remove it. But she also expressed that they typically do so when the issue is resolved, and she can't find any tickets stating that the issue was resolved?
For us, this issue resolved sometime around the beginning of the month. We're still left with all these cases against us though, what are we supposed to do at this point? Why were these service metrics not removed when the issue was resolved?!
There's no reason we should be at risk for a penalty for a glitch that was on eBay's side, where there's multiple SR#'s of CS representatives that saw the issue with their own eyes, and there's eBay's reports confirming this issue!
Where are we supposed to go to for help?
We know from February that this penalty is so severe that it leads to tens of thousands of dollars in losses. And Service Metrics stay on your record for 3 months... So should we have to face 3 months of penalties, amounting to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses, because of a glitch on eBay's side?!
This is an issue eBay should be taking responsibility for. It has made so much extra work for us, we had to put in efforts to support customers who were upset about this issue every single day, we had to send messages to the customers who faced this, offer them a chance to cancel if they would like, we had to go through every single one of these INR cases and organize our notes, and then deal with eBay constantly for attempts to resolve this issue, and the issue still isn't resolved! Shouldn't eBay be the ones to be putting in all the work to fix the problem that they have created!?
Why on earth is our account at risk for an issue that should be eBays responsibility? And why are they not willing to protect us, as promised on the morning of March 18th, as well as again on May 11th. I have the SR#'s of eBay confirming everything I've said. How to I get in contact with anyone who is willing to help?
Or are we just expected to take these losses when it's a problem that has been confirmed to not be any fault of our own?
