There’s been a bit of uncertainty on the eBay.com Forums concerning eBay’s latest announcement regarding My Messages. The announcement said “Starting next week, your email account associated with your eBay user ID will be automatically synched with your eBay My Messages folder”. Users were immediately worried that eBay would have access to their private email client and be able to see all of their emails.
This is incorrect – eBay will have no access to your Outlook or any other email client. All that will happen is that when you respond to an eBay message from your linked email account, the status of the message will now be automatically updated in My Messages, for example, if an email has been opened or replied to.
This will make it easier for you to communicate with your buyers. When you send replies they’ll automatically be copied to your My Message sent items as well as appearing in your buyer’s My Message inbox. That’ll make it easier for you to see a full record of communications as well as enabling eBay support to help you should there be a communication issue affecting feedback for example.
Good news for sellers in the UK – although this isn’t scheduled to go live at the same time as on eBay.com, it will be coming to UK in the Summer and will be announced in the next Seller Release.