eBay Shipping: System unavailable. Please try again later!

[ljonesny]

This is not my first post on this subject and I have heard ever so many theories on why the eBay-PayPal-Pitney Bowes shipping shipping system gives the ever-so-annoying 'System unavailable. Please try again later!' error after finishing payment authorization in PayPal. This has been going on for months, if not years. It used to be that I could just go to USPS Click n Ship, but I no longer get any discount there, so I am paying not only a higher postage rate but also final value on the shipping. Any ideas on how to get this system to work as intended and actually generate mailing labels?

[jewelgems27]

Did you try using a different browser like Google Chrome?

[ljonesny]

It also crashes with Google chrome, only with a different flavor of error message:

We're having trouble printing your label.

• • We're having trouble printing your label.We had a problem retrieving the label. [Error: 0]

[skeemirsky]

A SOLUTION THAT HAS WORKED FOR ME, well 3 out of 3 times...

Click the link on the left to see just your "SOLD" items, ie *NOT* "ALL SELLING"... then select the items you want labels for and "PRINT SHIPPING LABELS"...

I did the above process after getting the rejection message from the "ALL SELLING" page, maybe that particular timing / order could be a factor...

[a_c_green]

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@ljonesny wrote:

This is not my first post on this subject and I have heard ever so many theories on why the eBay-PayPal-Pitney Bowes shipping shipping system gives the ever-so-annoying 'System unavailable. Please try again later!' error after finishing payment authorization in PayPal. This has been going on for months, if not years. It used to be that I could just go to USPS Click n Ship, but I no longer get any discount there, so I am paying not only a higher postage rate but also final value on the shipping. Any ideas on how to get this system to work as intended and actually generate mailing labels?

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Just to clarify here: are you unable to print any labels at all, or is this only an occasional problem for you? I've seen that rather misleading error appear when attempting to print a label for which the address cannot be validated or the ZIP+4 cannot be determined. It gets rejected by the network, so the purchase is declined, and the user gets that error message seen above. It's obviously intended to refer to network outages, but I've found in the past that it's also triggered by bad input.

If you have a mailing address that's failing with the message above, try going to the USPS ZIP Code Lookup page (here), plug in the problem address exactly as you received it, click the blue Find button, and see what comes back. If it's been revised or corrected in some way (there's usually something that gets tweaked in the process of normalizing the address), make those same changes in the Shipping form and try it again. (Note that you're not giving up Seller protection as you're not changing the delivery location, just fixing the address.)

P.S. Ugh... I just noticed that I'm replying to a necro-thread from last February. Oh, well, maybe the above will be useful to someone anyway...

[swenson8781]

I get that message on & off too.  I guess I've always just figured the system is overloaded at the moment.  After I get the message I try again, and usually within the next 2-3 minutes I can print the label.

Once or twice, I've had it delayed for more than 5 minutes, and I closed out my browser and went back in and was able to print.  And yes, it has been going on for at least a year that I recall.  In the beginning, I wouldn't be able to print for about 15-20 minutes, so 5 minutes currently doesn't bother me as much! 

[a_c_green]

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@swenson8781 wrote:

I get that message on & off too.  I guess I've always just figured the system is overloaded at the moment.  After I get the message I try again, and usually within the next 2-3 minutes I can print the label.

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Yes, taken literally, that's certainly what it's intended to warn you about. I think it's sloppy coding that lets the system return that same message when the real problem may be a bad address.

[xisogames · Accepted solution]

I can only print usps labels with chrome

[socalproshopsd]

Yeah this is pretty high on the list of 7,684 things ebay doesn't care to fix or even address.  I get this all the freaking time; but not always.  So yeah it might be a not perfect address. 

Last time it happened I just printed the label in the PayPal payment and it worked fine(after 10 fails in a row on ebay).  Today all I did was login to PayPal in a different tab before trying to print a label on ebay and it worked like a charm(after 10 fails in a row on ebay).

Seems like it might be a linking up with PayPal thing???

[cad777864]

I have been dealing with this on and off for a year.  It is not ebay, it is Paypal.

Paypal has been changing there site as well off and on for the past year, (joy).

Every time they do this, the transmission of labels to ebay gets messed up in 

the coding of certain people for some reason.  You have to call paypal and ask 

for the tech dept.  Tell them of the issue, there may even be a denial but tell them

you want a ticket pulled to fix.  Then it will be fixed, until the next unnecessary change.

[ljonesny]

The solution for me was and is to use the Google Chrome browser when I am printing my labels. These errors are very rare when I use Chrome, but happen more often than not using my regular Firefox.

[andie*sb]

@skeemirsky thanks so much i was panicking to get my pkg out ... your tip worked W O O !

[8021q]

I've been a consistent seller on ebay for 5 years and I have always encountered this error. I would say I get it about 40%-50% of the time, sometimes its worse, and there have been days that I miss my mail pickup time because of it. It's not the browser, i've tried chrome, IE, opera, safari, and firefox. This single error has probally wasted nearly a hundred hours of my time over the past 5 years.

[lasertoner]

Me too.  For years.  And I am sick and tired of this.  It wouldn't be so bad if PayPal offered the full line of USPS services as eBay shipping.  But I use a lot of Regional A & B priority boxes which are not on PayPal.  Today I have tried 10 times overs the last hours.  Keep getting that **bleep** message.  eBay:  You and Pitney Bowes get more lines and more servers.  You can afford them.