eBay

baxterbog · ‎11-23-2018

We are an Alaskan ebayer and we have been buying and selling on ebay for over 12 years now. Ebay is well aware of an issue that forces us to change our zip code to one from the lower 48 to be able to see our own listings. Alas, ebay has yet to fix the problem.

We were just doing a price check prior to listing a card. We searched 2012 Cooperstown Crystal Mike Schmidt. With our Alaskan zip of 99603, the search returned 2 matches. Changed our zip to 85016, and the search returned 5 matches. Checked the additional 3 matches and discovered that they do in fact ship to Alaska. If you are shopping ebay from Alaska, use extreme caution.

berserkerplanet · ‎11-23-2018

The HATA (Hawaii,Alaska,Territories,APO/FPO) bug doesn't care about where the item ships - it only makes search behaves as if it does.

Think of it more as a bug that treats all viewers in HATA locations as if they are located in the state of Jefferson* where no USA seller listings on eBay ship to, and are therefore hidden from the viewers in the same way as items that don't actually ship to Alaska/Hawaii, Territories, or APO/FPO because of seller exclusions.

* a non-existent amalgamation of Northern California and Southern Oregon still being petitioned for.

BTW, I recently figured out a kludge for quickly switching zipcodes and/or countries back and forth (still working on a programatic way to do it if I can ever figure out where in the cookies the info resides and decrypt that data):

Bookmark a listing (preferably one that lives forever like a GTC commodity listing)
Open 2 tabs with that listing.
Leave the first tab alone which has your default location in it.
Use the second tab to change to a "foreign" zipcode, hit "get rates", and leave it alone
Do your searching in another tab with that "foreign" zipcode, which will allow you to see
results that might be hidden from you using your default location.
Pop over to the first tab that has your default location and hit get rates
Now when you open listings from that search page they will have your correct zipcode and will
show correct shipping (and will also indicate if that listing doesn't actually ship to your location)
To change the search or look at more pages of search results you need to pop over to
the second tab (the one with the foreign" zip code) and hit get rates there to change
back to the "foreign" location before searching or again
When done, switch to first tab, hit "get rates" to reset to your default location
and close the tabs.

Klunky, yes, but far easier than typing in zipcodes all the time. I do a lot of country switching while researching listings and eBay stores for answering questions here, and it was getting annoying to scroll down the pulldowns to the US and type my zipcode in every 2 minutes while toggling back and forth.

I actually shortcut the above procedure by opening the first search result twice, leaving the first instance alone as my home location reset, and using the second one to switch to that seller's country and look at their store, listings, and search results.

dtexley3 · ‎11-23-2018

@berserkerplanet wrote:
The HATA (Hawaii,Alaska,Territories,APO/FPO) bug doesn't care about where the item ships - it only makes search behaves as if it does.

Think of it more as a bug that treats all viewers in HATA locations as if they are located in the state of Jefferson* where no USA seller listings on eBay ship to, and are therefore hidden from the viewers in the same way as items that don't actually ship to Alaska/Hawaii, Territories, or APO/FPO because of seller exclusions.

* a non-existent amalgamation of Northern California and Southern Oregon still being petitioned for.

Ya still can't have Crater Lake, we told ya this a dozen times, it's not happening..... Now K-Falls? That you can have.... LOLOLOL.

Member of the Grumpy Old Man crew

baxterbog · ‎11-24-2018

Thanks so much berserkerplanet. We have discussed this issue a few times. And you have been very helpful. If you recall, ebay stated that they hoped to have a fix in place with their fall 2018 updates. This bug has been in place, at least from what we have seen, since June 2017. On October 6th we were able to see half our listings for about 2 hours without altering our zip code. It didn't last long. We assume that was ebay's attempt to fix the bug.

We understand that this impacts a relatively small part of the ebay population. And that is likely why there hasn't been any real movement on the issue. But that doesn't make it right. How many folks in these impacted areas know to switch their zip code prior to doing a search to get the best results? Probably not many. How much have folks from these impacted areas overpaid for their puchases on ebay because of this bug? Probably more than a few bucks. Since it appears that ebay isn't going to fix the problem, should they alert folks in these impacted areas of the bug? Seems like the responsible thing to do. Or maybe they should just fix the problem.

baxterbog · ‎11-25-2018

Are there any suggestions as to how one might get ebay to finally fix this bug? We have been asking them for a resolution since August 2017.

goinsailin · ‎11-26-2018

I’m an experienced eBayer living in Alaska and I just called eBay customer service today and spent about a half hour describing this “search problem that I just discovered” which I thought was related to the fact that I am a dedicated Mac OSX user. For about half of the sellers that I tried to “see other items” or clicked to “visit store” I would find no items listed or an empty store,.. not even the listing that I had just been looking at! Then I tried key word searching for specific items that I knew were current listings (from links sent by a “saved seller”), and they would not show up in the search results. The eBay customer service person thanked me for the report and suggested that I try using Google Chrome instead of Safari or Firefox, “since eBay is built for a Windows environment using Google Chrome as the browser.” She made no mention of this geographical component of the “bug” described in this thread. I tried the same tests with Chrome and got the same “no items / empty store” results. Dumping cookies, clearing browser history and restarting made no difference with the problem in either Safari, Firefox or Chrome. I suggest all Alaskan eBayers call customer service and complain until the do something about fixing this coding “bug.”

baxterbog · ‎11-27-2018

Thanks for the great post goinsailin. Your recent experience with "customer support" is typcial of what we've been hearing from ebay since June 2017. The "clear browser" and "switch browser" response drives me up the wall. In August of this year, we were told that the ebay tech team had this on a priority fix list. That was the last update that we were able to pry from them. Not a peep since. Supposedly this was to be corrected with the fall updates. That obviously didn't happen. As berserkerplanet mentioned, this bug doesn't just impact Alaskans. It impacts pretty much all US States and Territories outside the lower 48. Since we don't make up much of ebay's transactional volume, the fix must be very low priority. We can't understand how a company would let such a bug exist without a fix for such an extended period of time. Pretty sad.

alaskalervold · ‎02-26-2020

I'm fairly inexperienced at buying/selling on Ebay, but would like to get into it. I too am in AK. And would appreciate any suggestions and inside tips.