eBay billing problem in October

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You might be in a for a higher than expected eBay bill in November. eBay UK has been contacting sellers to say that some final value fees were miscalculated in October and will be added to their November invoice.

As they say in the email: “During the month of October, we experienced a system error that miscalculated some of your final value fees.

To adjust for this error, you will see the missing final value fees listed on your next invoice. In addition, the accurate final value fees will be reflected on your account status page in approximately 72 hours.”

What we don’t know is the scale of the problem. Is this just a UK problem or are sellers in other countries impacted too? What proportion of the FVFs were miscalculated? How many sellers have been impacted.

Let us know if you’ve been affected.

Find the email below. (Replete with two ways to spell apologise/apologize)

billing

17 Responses

  1. We’ve had this email through too. If there’s been a mistake, then it’s fair enough — we are none of us immune from errors — and we’re happy to pay what we owe. However, finding out what that is, and how much it’s going to be, is turning out to be rather hard as i look into this further.

    This email doesn’t include that detail — you’d have thought that was the natural place to put it — so all I’m left with is a nagging worry that I’m going to take a cashflow hit going into Q4. It’s all a bit last-minute too. The billing cycle is tomorrow, so you get the overall sense that there’s a lot of shooting from the hip going on over there in Luxembourg as someone realises they made a slip-up and rushes to fix it. It’s not a sense of being in control that I get from this communication. It’s barely proof-read. The link in it just goes through to a generic customer service page. When you contact customer service through that page, they haven’t heard of the problem (would you mind sending me the content of the email so that I can see it?). When they try to find out what the solution is, the eBay finance system is so creaky that they can’t actually load our invoice to look at it (in fairness we do have a big invoice — 336 pages last month).

    In doing this, I’ve noticed a few fees that I don’t recognise on our bill, and I’m left with a general sense of unease that I can’t check my invoice and no-one really knows if it is right or not. Great that they’ve caught this error (how was it made? how did they find it?). But what else might be wrong in there?

    To be honest, there are many commercial aspects that I would fixed at eBay before their invoicing system, but I would certainly like the ability to analyse what amounts to a solid 6-figure bill each year for my business, and see where I can make savings!

  2. ebay dont make costly mistakes, ebay’s mistakes are paid for by the sellers.
    maybe if they did feel the pain of their own mistakes they’d make less of them in future.

  3. We’ve had this and we can’t check our invoice as it is “too big” to download.

    What stinks is the constant stream of fees Ebay takes which they are not entitled to from system errors, refunds for failure to combine postage etc etc.

    It would have been a bit of positive PR for Ebay to say they’ll waive it.

    In any case, I can’t tell whether it’s a few pence or tens of pounds we’re talking about., or even if their assertion is valid at all.

    Big fat raspberry to Feebay / Greedbay / Leechbay

    Someone should put in a call to Trading Standards, we can’t see this bill, why should we pay it?

  4. Afterthought:

    All these system errors that never seem to get fixed, they all have the habit of benefitting Ebay in terms of extra fees.

    A few pence/cents here and there, it must add up to millions over a year.

    And most sellers will not be ars*d to spend the time on the phone to try and sort it out.

    Isn’t is about time this was flagged up big time?

    And paypal are at it too. They don’t give back the transaction fee when you make a refund.

    It all stinks.

    Does anybody regulate Ebay or Paypal and make them play fair ????

  5. CS latest response:-
    “Thank you for writing back to us with regard on your invoice.

    I truly understand that you would like to know how many transactions you have on your upcoming November bill from October period. However it appears that you have too many transactions to display that is not yet invoice and we don’t have tools where we can see the number of items you have sold during this period. ”

    I give up.

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