Why does eBay accept buyer addresses that are invalid, and produce an error when producing a label?

[falconsys]

This is kind of a spiritual follow-up to this thread that was closed, unresolved: Why does eBay accept addresses that are invalid? - The eBay Community

Occasionally, I end up selling a sticker to someone in another country. With a far higher occurrence than domestic shipments, those international addresses have issues that make eBay consider them invalid when it's time for me to print a shipping label.

In my most recent case, the buyer revised their shipping address in their profile - but it wasn't reflected in the order! Seems to be no way to let the buyer update an invalid shipping address on an existing order.

However, what adds another serious issue to this, is that when I make adjustments to the address to match what the buyer put in their profile, the shipping label page says "Something went wrong and we were not able to generate the label". Uh, excuse me, would you like to elaborate?

With the F12 developer tools console, I retrieved the real result that the server provided, when asked to produce a label. The server said "[{"errorCode":"UNKNOWN","detailedMessage":"Label generation failed on AddressAlteredFraudCheckAction","type":"SERVER"}]". Louder for those in the back: it says "AddressAlteredFraudCheckAction".

That is, it's flagging my edits -- to match the buyer's actual address and fit it in the constraints that eBay placed on character limits for the international labels, that are only shown to me and not the buyer, putting the burden of resolving these issues on me and not the buyer -- as "Fraud".

Can we friggin' PLEASE ... FIX ... THIS? It's been over 4 years!

[soh.maryl]

There are some intricacies in your message about addresses that I have to admit I don't understand; however, it's always been my understanding that a seller is REQUIRED by eBay to only ever ship to the address he sees when the buyer pays.  The buyer has the chance to change that address when making payment.  If he does not change the address at that time, his purchase is going to be shipped to that address and he can't change it later by message or any other method.  So I've been wrong about this all this time?  

[falconsys]

Yes and no. 

I (seller) have never had any reason to WANT to change an address - however, eBay's shipping system errors sometimes REQUIRE me to change it - because it immediately gives me (the seller) an error when I click the button to produce a shipping label.

Instead of giving the BUYER that message, when they submitted the erroneous address, this system shifts the blame/responsibility onto me (the seller) with no knowledge of how to correct the address - aside from, perhaps, some common sense abbreviations to fit into character limits.

Often, when I run into this, I will either give up and cancel/refund the order (again - why did eBay accept it in the first place with an invalid address?), or I'll chat with the buyer about it. When the buyer updates the address in their profile, it still doesn't update the order. And yet, furthermore - if I change it to the address that the buyer gave me and has updated on their profile (as per screenshots they shared to confirm the details), I get an ambiguous error about "something went wrong", that, when dug deeper, translates to "fraud detection".

Now, as to "how?", that's easy: when eBay's shipping system gives me (the seller) an error when trying to ship the order, it presents me with the complete shipping address form to edit however I like (there's no way to proceed, without editing until it's satisfied). But it also warns that, substantial changes to the address (which I never do) would possibly invalidate seller protection. Great. I'm not substantially changing it, I don't mind. Just fitting it into the character limits that eBay put on the field for me as a seller, but not the buyer who entered it, for the buyer's address.

Hopefully it's now clear how horribly broken this all is 😉

[1tuna]

the reason this happens is that its a format issue

the folks in charge of address are not in charge of shipping

that is the problem

if pitney bowes was in charge of addresses and formatting the problem would go away

the problem is that pitney bowes is much better than ebay when it comes to addresses

@falconsys 

[glgenterprise]

I've been complaining about this for literally YEARS. The checkout system does not do a character count check against the label generating software, and about once a month I'll get an address that will not produce a label. When I go to edit it, get the usual warning about voiding seller protection by altering the address.

I hate the standard fix, which is to cancel and have the buyer repurchase with an altered shipping address. 50% of the time you've spooked them off enough that they won't repurchase from you. With a US based address I can usually suss out a reasonable edit, but with the international ones, who knows what is more important for correct delivery? Since I don't get a warning about this until I'm printing labels and often it is the middle of the night for a foreign buyer, then I'm faced with not meeting my handling times waiting for an edit answer from a buyer.

It's such a simple fix to me, but then this is the same programming department that can't get the dimensions in the correct order on the shipping pages, so there's that.

[a_c_green]

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@soh.maryl wrote:

There are some intricacies in your message about addresses that I have to admit I don't understand; however, it's always been my understanding that a seller is REQUIRED by eBay to only ever ship to the address he sees when the buyer pays.  The buyer has the chance to change that address when making payment.  If he does not change the address at that time, his purchase is going to be shipped to that address and he can't change it later by message or any other method.  So I've been wrong about this all this time?  

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The seller can modify or correct the address if needed, as long as he's not actually changing the location to which it will be delivered. For example, breaking one long line into two shorter ones is okay, and may be needed to get the address accepted at all.

This is especially true when shipping to countries such as Australia or the UK, where the buyer pre-pays the VAT or Customs duty to eBay, and eBay then adds a special confirmation code to the second line of the address so that the buyer isn't charged a second time by his post office.

The problem that crops up is that the eBay confirmation gets appended to whatever else is already on that line, leading to an overloaded line (if address text was already present) that is then rejected. The seller needs to use a little creativity to rearrange the lines to fit. (There is a Company Name field that's usually blank, and I've used that myself for address overflows in the past.)

[falconsys]

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@a_c_green wrote:

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The seller can modify or correct the address if needed, as long as he's not actually changing the location to which it will be delivered. For example, breaking one long line into two shorter ones is okay, and may be needed to get the address accepted at all.

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See, though that's already a bad thing to need to do, it's also not true. If the seller changes the address (this has happened to me multiple times) to try to correct formatting to the same location, this happens (as in my original post with bold print):

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However, what adds another serious issue to this, is that when I make adjustments to the address to match what the buyer put in their profile, the shipping label page says "Something went wrong and we were not able to generate the label". Uh, excuse me, would you like to elaborate?

With the F12 developer tools console, I retrieved the real result that the server provided, when asked to produce a label. The server said "[{"errorCode":"UNKNOWN","detailedMessage":"Label generation failed on AddressAlteredFraudCheckAction","type":"SERVER"}]". Louder for those in the back: it says "AddressAlteredFraudCheckAction".

That is, it's flagging my edits -- to match the buyer's actual address and fit it in the constraints that eBay placed on character limits for the international labels, that are only shown to me and not the buyer, putting the burden of resolving these issues on me and not the buyer -- as "Fraud".

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It's already bad enough to have to face this dumb error on a regular basis, but to be given an obscure, system-guts-level error related to "fraud" is levels beyond worse.

[monster-deals]

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@soh.maryl wrote:

a seller is REQUIRED by eBay to only ever ship to the address he sees when the buyer pays.  

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Nope.

Seller can ship it anywhere they please.

Though 98.6% of the time that would be a terrible idea.