New eBay Technical Fails You Need to Watch Out For

In this last week we’ve encountered two eBay technical fails that resulted in multiple customer service calls. We’re not sure how many other people have been affected by these problems, so we welcome your comments.

Technical Fail #1

We have around 600 neck ties on eBay and in the last week or so we have sold three of them internationally. International buyers are getting a great deal since they are being given at least a 50% discount on calculated shipping. We sold one tie to Canada and they were only charged $2.15 for shipping. Anyone knows that is way cheap for international shipping!

So we called eBay… The first phone call resulted in a refund for the difference of what the shipping cost us. The representative told us that he believed the reason for the error was because on the shipping weight we selected “1lb or less” and we should have selected “custom weight”. This didn’t make much sense to us… A pound of bricks or a pound of feathers, it’s the same thing, right? But, we went along with it and changed our active listings to custom weight. However, we had this strange suspicion that after changing to custom weight and saving the listing, it was still reverting back to “1 lb or less”. Sure enough, they did… eBay automatically reverts shipping weight to “1 lb or less” if you enter less than 16 ounces in the custom weight box. So that doesn’t work! We sold two more ties internationally since then and eBay has refunded the loss in shipping both times. They claim this is a known issue and are working on fixing it.

Technical Fail #2

Earlier this month eBay asked us to enroll in their extended holiday returns. We enrolled early with the promise that on November 1st eBay would automatically put the holiday returns on our listings and we would keep our Top Rated Plus benefits. However, we noticed that every time we relist or make an edit to listings, eBay has been removing the extended holiday returns opt-in and reverting our current return policy to 14 days (we always offer 30 day returns). Again, we called eBay and this is a known issue that they are trying to fix. So from now on, we always have to check to see if we have a warning about our Top Rated Plus and go in to edit the listing to add it back on.