I've been selling since 2001 and I occasionally ship an item to another country and when I go to print my shipping label, ebay's system tells me that the shipping address is "invalid." This problem only occurs once in a while but I don't understand why it ever happens at all. After further research, the reason that the address is invalid is because the formatting is incorrect. Apparently ebay's system doesn't allow for more than 40 characters on one line. I am given the option to "revise" the address, but by doing this, I would invalidate my seller protection. Why should I lose my protection because of something that is not my fault? In fact, why does ebay's system not have failsafes in protection to prevent an invalid address to be registered on ebay in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to be preventative instead of reactionary? I mean, why is it when I am trying to change my password, ebay won't let me submit a new one unless it meats the requirements for their passwords (specific number of characters & numbers etc). However, when it comes to a buyer registering an address that will later show up to be "invalid" possibly due to incorrect formatting, why does ebay's website allow that address to pass through, allow them to make purchases, and then make it the seller's problem to either revise the address or cancel the transaction? Why should I have to risk losing a potential sale or doing extra work by contacting a buyer from another country in another time zone who might speak a different language, etc. Ebay is a billion dollar company and it is completely inexcusable for them to not fix this issue. I've mentioned this problem over 5 years ago and all I have gotten is that the agents will pass along the information to their technical team. Yet, it never gets fixed, because it just happened again! This is a website run by humans so it can be programmed to do anything you want it to do. Ebay support, I don't want sympathy, I want solutions!
