Simon is a seller on eBay. He’s a good seller but always wants to do better, what better way than to monitor his eBay dashboard. Here’s what he found and what he had to say:
For a while I have been looking at the sellers dashboard and have been checking out where we can do better. One of the things I noticed was that we were failing in the time taken to upload tracking information to the USA, on occasion.
We seem to be compliant in the UK but not in the good old USA. We don’t list directly on country’s own local sites (yet) but just on eBay.co.uk and then let eBay sort out where they will show our listings.
eBay.com don’t recognise UK holidays
I downloaded the reports and then worked out the dates we had failed to upload tracking in time.
| Transaction date and time (Pacific Time) |
Payment cleared date and time (Pacific Time) |
Tracking upload date and time (Pacific Time) |
| 18/04/2014 13:08 | 18/04/2014 13:08 | 22/04/2014 05:31 |
| 18/04/2014 15:50 | 18/04/2014 15:50 | 22/04/2014 05:31 |
| 18/04/2014 18:37 | 18/04/2014 18:37 | 22/04/2014 05:31 |
| 19/04/2014 19:37 | 19/04/2014 19:38 | 22/04/2014 05:31 |
This appears to be in the Easter holidays. Now, we dispatch by Royal Mail Airsure (soon to change to Tracked and Signed) and Royal Mail collect from us Monday to Friday EXCLUDING bank holidays.
I phoned eBay to ask them about how this can be that we are being penalised and the lady firstly told me I could convey that I would be closed for the bank holiday, which I said wouldn’t really work and is not the answer.
She then looked further into it and realised that it was a problem.
She is now logging the issue with their techs and will hopefully let me know. ALWAYS GET A CASE ID NUMBER!!!!
This now bought me onto another issue very similar re compliance with the returns policy.
eBay.co.uk Returns policy not sufficient for eBay.com
I asked her about why we seemed to not comply with the returns policy in the USA whereas we do in the UK.
| Stated dispatch time on listing | Fulfils dispatch time requirement on listing? | Stated returns window | Fulfils returns window requirement? | Stated refund policy | Fulfils refund policy requirement? |
| 1 | Yes | 14 Days | Yes | None | No |
| 1 | Yes | 14 Days | Yes | None | No |
| 1 | Yes | 14 Days | Yes | None | No |
| 1 | Yes | 14 Days | Yes | None | No |
She looked at our listings and puzzled said, we are compliant.
Again this is being logged and raised.
It appears that the USA site requires extra information that we are not able to put in our listings here in the UK. The 2 main reasons that I want to comply are:
1) Discount (while we can get it)
2) In case account is restricted for no compliance.
Whilst typing this I have actually received a response from eBay.
Hi Simon,
xxxxx here from eBay Customer Support. We just spoke on the phone there about your seller performance reports on the US side of things. I tried to call you back however the number just rang out.
I have spoken to our Support Specialist on this for you and they have advised that although not selling directly onto the US site it is the Dot.com team you need to speak to as it the US standards you are being based on and we are not trained on the reasons etc behind how their performance standards work.
What I would say is if you call us again after 3pm any day of the week we can transfer you over to the US Top Customer Care Team. If you feel you do not get the answers you were looking for from these agents you can call the UK team again and quote call reference x-xxxxxxxxxxx and I will take this over for you.
If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to ask.
Many Thanks,
xxxxx
eBay Customer Support
Can you help Simon?
Have you come across either of these two issues before? Do you know a way around them and how Simon can comply by uploading shipping information on Bank Holidays or get his UK Returns policy recognised by eBay.com? Hopefully eBay will come back to Simon with some answers, but in the mean time any advice on how you handle these two issues would be welcome.
3 Responses
I am afraid this ebay failing again on cross border trade and it hasn’t all been thought through.
We have the same problem on .de, we listed directly and had a good up lift of sales before Christmas, over the holidays we were marked down which has now left us below standard, which I don’t see how we will ever get back out of it.
It turned out ebay was overriding what we marked as a dispatch time telling customers would received goods just 24 hours after we sent them!
When you call customer care about this you just end up stuck between one site, .de, and the other, .co.uk saying it’s each others fault.
Amazon do have a much better cross border strategy by having separate accounts in each country making it easier to manage and monitor.
I don’t list on international local sites but wonder if those that do, do get a slap on the wrist for failing to dispatch at Easter or holidays that don’t happen in the destination country.
I suppose bank holidays would be another.
We get about 1 call a week from some AUHTORISED Ebay partner promoting international and cross border trade. I shall put it to them next time B-)
Had one of THOSE calls yesterday.
“We are partners with EBAY” hey ho here we go.
I pre empted what he was going to say and told him I wasn’t interested at this time. I put to him the above situations with bank holidays and Easter etc and he didn’t have a clue.
I think that says it all.