The eBay Gallery Fees glitch is still causing problems for sellers, charging £2.50 per listing, which to give them their due, eBay customer service appear to be refunding promptly once they’re notified of the issue on individual accounts.
However one seller tells us that having had a set of refunds in the middle of the week, have had to call eBay up for further refunds on a new set of listings. The advice they were given was to list all their new items together in one bulk session and then to contact customer support for the refunds.
The problem is that these aren’t new listings, they’re GTC which means they are automatically renewing as each listing’s 30 day period comes to an end. Naturally as the relists are automatic it’s not possible to request refunds en masse – the charges will appear as each individual listing renew.
It would appear (at least over the weekend) that the problem of spurious £2.50 charges has yet to be fixed. If you’ve not yet checked your eBay invoice you’d be well advised to do so before payment is taken.
23 Responses
We still can’t check our invoice.
Ebay says it is too big to show it and we requested a download 3 days which still hasn’t arrived.
So we still cannot see what Ebay is actually charging us and whether it is correct.
Check inside one of your listing’s if one is ticked on the SYI firm just call or go to chat with one item and they’ll clear the rest
Thanks for that, DBL.
Can’t find any yet, but with 70,000 listings it would take forever to check them individually.
Day 4 of waiting for the csv file of our latest invoice to be able to check properly.
Trust in Ebay pretty broken now.
Still not fixed. We don’t use the gallery fee for any of our items so eBay just refunded the advanced listing upgrade charges on our account for the whole month and said they will do the same for the next period until the issue is resolved. Shocking that it is taking this long.
It’s not a bug, it’s deliberate and they bank on a pile of businesses never spotting it and paying this bill.
I never believe any of this rubbish any more.
‘We are experiencing a higher than anticipated number of calls, please hold on our local rate phone line which is not covered by your mobile inclusive minutes while we string this out as long as we possibly can’
^^ it’s the same thing.
I don’t believe it either. Why is it that every time there is a bug it’s detrimental to business, sales or fees in some way? It never works out the other way around e.g. not being charged for something you should have been.
Trust in ebay broken? I’ve been on ebay for almost 20 years now and I think they’re one of the most corrupt businesses out there. I just wish I wasn’t so reliant on them but too late for me to start reinventing my business now.
I’m not sure if you misread my comment because I find it difficult to believe that you think I consider ebay to be corrupt because of ONE bug in 20 years? In fact I clearly stated, “Why is it that EVERY time there is a bug it’s detrimental to business, sales or fees in some way?”
I ask the question again – has there EVER been an error that has actually been financially beneficial to the seller, because if there has I can’t think of one. Don’t you find that odd?
There’s always something with ebay, and if the law were stronger we would be allowed to recoup any losses we had incurred, including almost endless hours of time correcting eBay’s mess, not to mention having to almost continuously re-update listings thanks to their constant rule changes.
This is eBay’s mess, they should be contacting us, checking and updating accounts, not the other way around. How much will they gain from people who have been charged but don’t know about it? You might think they’re all sweetness and light but it’s notable that they haven’t made any sort of announcement about it. Although it doesn’t seem to have affected my account I wouldn’t have known anything about it had I not ventured onto this site looking for something else. Is keeping this issue to themselves fraud or just an oversight do you think? sorry but it’s disgraceful.
As I implied I can quote many more examples, and I’m sure you’re also not naïve enough to think that it would be possible just to shut up shop and move on. As most people know it’s a sort of necessary evil – like thousands of other sellers I can’t simply walk away because I don’t like what’s happening or the way they conduct their business, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.
Incidentally I will mention one other scam of eBay’s – they have taken millions of pounds of tax on seller fees from UK non-VAT registered sellers, that by law they should not have taken because they were not registered in the UK (to save themselves from paying a large UK tax bill). By rights that money should be repaid – Amazon repaid sellers on request for the same thing and I got a large, 4-figure sum from them. But ebay have flatly refused to repay it all the way along. Now if holding onto people’s money that they should not have taken in the first place isn’t corrupt, I don’t know what is.
Alan, large businesses pay for telephone time in batches – they will pay for (for example) a million minutes and it literally costs fractions of a penny per minute. I’ll guarantee you a call to the Philippines via the 0800 number cost them a few pence per hour, literally. Don’t confuse what they pay with what the man in the street will pay via his mobile phone, it’s poles apart.
Frankly the only reason their call centre is based overseas is so they can get away with paying wages of a few pennies per hour. That’s good business for their shareholders but it’s not good customer service.
Trying to get something sorted out is another matter entirely. I’ve sent message after message after message at times and the replies have been the usual cut and paste jobs which often have no relevance to the question I’m asking, while at times they have referred to me as the buyer rather than the seller, got the item wrong, got the username wrong and a whole host of other things.
Calling them isn’t much better, I can’t understand half of them. Logistically this costs ebay sod all but costs me or my staff a great deal of time, usually with no end result. Their customer service is appalling, without a shadow of a doubt the absolute worst of any company I have ever dealt with. If we offered our customers that same level of service we would all be on 50% feedback.
around 15 years ago ebay under charged fees ,they wrote off large amounts and took interest free monthly payments on many more accounts
Jack, the average agency wage in the Philippines starts at around 30p an hour and call centre staff are more or less bottom of the pile. It’s pretty much unregulated too.
As for 0800 “backhaul costs”, that’s considerably less. Telecomms is my business, and from my time in sales I can assure you that the cost would be negligent. In fact it’s almost none existent as it uses VoiP, which virtually eliminates call costs. A company the size of ebay are unlikely to have been paying more than around 20p per operator per hour.
Foreign call centres are ridiculously cheap to implement, that’s why many of the major companies now do it – even the mobile networks, and that should tell you something.
I noticed under the seller hub overview today eBay have removed the link for the current month’s fees and replaced it with ‘Growth Summary’! That is very sneaky as customers might not notice what is occurring now. Rather than have the charges on the first screen you view you now have to go down to the bottom left and look under account summary.
That seems a little underhand.
All fixed here and all charges refunded.
ebay has failed to not contact sellers about gallery plus fees,as I found the error myself.
my gallery plus fees are still building up,even after some were refunded.
I feel sorry for the sellers that are not aware of this bug and got debited on the 15 of june.
I’ve had 2 refunds for multiple gallery plus charges and they are still building up so it looks like a regular call for a bit.
An announcement and some reassurance of refunds doesn’t take a lot but needs to be done.