Approximately a month ago, I encountered a situation while attempting to tidy up my business policies based on advice given to me. I embarked on the task of migrating listings to policies in bulk, when unexpectedly, the system started rejecting my policy migrations after a few listing updates. Instead of simply failing and leaving the remaining listings under the original policy, it began duplicating them with the same name, followed by a random set of numbers. The more I tried to rectify the situation, the more it worsened. This issue originally affected my returns policies. But I also began updating and streamlining numerous shipping policies that I had established early on, while also removing unused ones that were present when I initially set up my seller account. This is when things took a bizarre turn as the system started replicating and applying old policies to my products. Many listings were inexplicably assigned to one of several free shipping policies I was attempting to eliminate.
Coincidentally, I had just initiated a three-day markdown sale for Memorial Day, offering a substantial discount on my entire store. However, this locked down all my products, preventing any changes for 24 hours after initiating the markdown sale. So not only did I have discounted prices on all products, but I also ended up with free shipping set on more than half of my store. I was unable to modify anything, which added to the confusion. To make matters worse, the markdown promotion had an unexpected effect: instead of deducting or marking down the items when added to the cart, it actually altered the prices within my listings. As a result, prices that typically ended in "$xx.95" became irregular, such as "$xx.07." Frankly, at this moment, I can't recall if the prices eventually reverted back automatically. However, that wasn't the most severe issue. The price change propagated to every other sales channel where I sold products, with eBay acting as the data source. This caused the items on those channels, where I had already used their promotional tools for Memorial Day, to receive an additional discount. For instance, my 25% holiday discount on eBay resulted in a 25% reduction in list prices, which was then reflected on platforms like Bonanza. Consequently, the listings on Bonanza received an additional 25% discount, totaling a 50% reduction. I was extremely frustrated when I finally grasped the complete extent of what was happening.
I reached out to eBay seller support seeking assistance, but they were unable to pinpoint the problem or understand why these changes occurred in such a manner. They proposed disabling transactions to my store until they could resolve the issue, promising to get back to me within 24 hours. I firmly declined their suggestion. To cut a long story short, the matter remained unresolved. No one ever followed up with me, and my store, being relatively new, experienced inconsistent sales and minimal traffic. Fortunately, the losses incurred from the discounts were not significant. However, I did contact eBay again to request a refund for the shipping charges I paid during the period when I couldn't update my policies due to the system's inexplicable alterations. They agreed and applied credit to my account for several orders.
In the end my policies are a bigger mess than they were and I am still finding issues with some listings having the wrong shipping policies applied to them, so I'm picking them off one by one as issues arise. I didn't use the bulk listing tool because I've found that at times it makes changes to listings that I didn't make or forces me to make further changes to attributes in fields other than those I'd edited in the bulk update tool.
Sorry for the long reply, but there's a whole lot I found problematic in a short period of time - primarily discovered after updating my eBay business policies.
