We’ve had several sellers contact us about a possible problem over the past weekend about not receiving notifications about buyer Returns requests on eBay UK.
So, if you’re selling on eBay, you’re best advised to take a few minutes to investigate if you’ve been affected and if you need to take action. It could very well be an issue limited to a small number of sellers.
Details: it seems that some sellers have not received emails from buyers regarding Returns requests. Apparently this occurred between the 6th and 16th of May.
The sellers affected have said that subsequently, because they didn’t know they needed to take action on a returns request, that eBay has automatically found in the buyer’s favour as a result of the seller’s inaction in not replying.
One seller has reported that he got this message from eBay about the situation: “The issue, which affected returns requests raised between 6 and 16 May, is now resolved and any further notifications will be delivered to you as usual.
We sincerely apologise for this issue. Rest assured, we’ve let buyers know that this was not your fault and have asked them to give you more time to respond to their returns requests.
Please go to your returns dashboard to manage any open returns requests. We will ensure that for any returns that you haven’t been able to respond to, and for which the buyer has asked us to step in and help, defects will be removed.”
So, if there is a widespread problem, it’s good news that eBay is giving sellers extra time to help buyers.
We’ve asked eBay to clarify the situation. But our request was sent late in the day on Monday so we can’t criticise them for not getting back to us by time of publication and we will update the post when we hear back.
But in the meantime, do check your Returns dashboard.
Have you been impacted?
4 Responses
Another day and another glitch welcome to the lala land of eBay
The other glitch is items from the USA to the UK with Global shipping are showing as free delivery in the search results.
How had can it be to have a functioning website its one glitch after another and the sellers sales suffer with not even an apology from eBay never mind our fees back
yes had quite a few affected. luckily one customer had already opened a case and messaged seperately, so we’d seen his case anyway despite ebay not mentioning, the rest of them we managed to recover before the “respond by” date once we were informed.
Yup, We only realised there was an issue when a buyer who had opened a return request 4 days earlier sent us a message and said if we don’t respond he would ask eBay to step in. Slightly surprised I checked the return requests on eBay and we had 4 open. This is annoying as our email account has a filter on where return requests and buyer opened a case requests are sent to a special folder that means we can respond straight away. Us being naive and believing this way of doing things and relying on eBay actually working without glitches has led to a few annoyed customers.
I guess eBay have their own defect rate for their systems which is far more liberal than the defect rate allowed for sellers that rely on eBay systems
Its still not working properly.
One of my buyers opened a return on the 1st, which I’ve responded to.
This morning (the 2nd) I’ve got an email from eBay stating
‘.. you’ve received a return request: please respond.’
I only have the one return open to which I have already responded… The link inside the email takes me to a returns page that I’ve never seen before. It looks like the standard returns page for non-business eBayer’s.
https://my.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbayBeta&CurrentPage=MyeBayNextReturn&ssPageName=STRK%3AME%3ALNLK%3AMEREX
Useless.