We are expecting the second eBay Seller Release of the year to be published tomorrow and with an announcement of increased eBay seller protection and tools for merchants who trade on the marketplace.
Unusually for eBay, Devin Wenig, eBay CEO and President, has given a preview of the Seller Release and revealed the date in advance. Normally seller releases are sprung on sellers with no prior notice. However, this time around the secret was already more or less out of the bag as eBay in their early 2019 Seller Release announced that the second release of the year would be coming in April and, being as tomorrow is the 30th of April, tomorrow is the last day for the eBay Seller Release to appear.
It’s even more unusual for eBay to announce something like increased eBay seller protection and new tools will be a part of the seller release or indeed give advance notice of any details of what’s to come.
we promised among other things this year enhanced seller protections and tools to be successful on our marketplace. Step 1 of a multi-part plan comes this week with the Spring SR. We've listened to seller feedback and are making changes directly in response. More Tuesday..
— Devin Wenig (@devinwenig) April 28, 2019
It’s interesting to see that there is a ‘multi-part plan’ coming for eBay seller protection and eBay tools and whatever else is announced tomorrow is just the first step. It looks like eBay have been listening to their sellers and agree the balance has swung too much in favour of the buyer when it comes to claims and that new tools are needed for merchants to be successful.
Naturally, as soon as further detail are announced and the full seller release is revealed we’ll be writing more on this topic tomorrow.
27 Responses
I managed to get eBay to refund me the postage of a return label from somebody that claimed an item to be fake. Usual hopos and hedges to jump over / through but got there in the end.
@ Rob, ebay are obliged by law to allow returns. They need to make it “easy” to minimise the manpower required.
in the past 6 months we have had over 50 click and collect returns – not Argos but the smaller shops who dont seem to realise that they are now an ebay collection point! they are rejecting the parcels!
generally speaking ebay have been fair and understanding and have covered me. Its when the buyer goes to the shop to collect and the item has been refused by the shop staff. Bing! another service metric defect.
I dont mind giving anyone a return or a refund – we often pay for the labels ourselves. just dont adversely effect our account when all I am doing is trying to give the customer a good buying experience.
mystic jim predicts
you can bet there will be a cost to any tool thats useful
I think it ridiculous, I sold a RARE CD, to a buyer, who soon after it being delivered demanded a refund, as he said his wife had purchased the CD from another source, he returned the item, but it was a fake CD. it had been swapped over, thinking I would not notice. I sold the CD For £45 and got a fake returned to me, probably costing nothing. EBay demanded I refund the money to the buyer & postage, leaving me nearly £50 out of pocket.
Ebay refused to listen to complaint.
Alan… Adepartment that deal with this? Seriously? I have seen buyers who have left negs etc for virtually everyone. Always stating the same thing, sometimes they have dozens a month. How is this not picked up?
Every time i complain all i get is the standard ‘as we can’t see what was sent and what was recieved we can’t do anything’…. line.
I have had buyers send stuff back as faulty yet openly admit in an ebay message that it wasn’t but didnt want to pay return cost… ebay said they couldn’t get involved despite admitting reading the message!! I had a 17kg parcel returned to me… sent as under 1 kg. checked by courier and confirmed under 1 kg. Worth £279….. Ebay refunded buyer and ran the same old line past me, refusing to get involved… I had to start legal action to get my item back from the buyer!
I could list loads of these events.
Ebay does bugger all as they have their fees and heaven forbid they upset a buyer, scammer or not. It hasn’t got the nickname scambay for nothing.
@Alan
“Millions of people are removed from the platform every year (internationally) both buyers and sellers – this PROVES ebay are being proactive but it is a very difficult if not almost impossible situation when they are having to adjudicate between buyer and seller.”
Where has this information come from? Is it actually verified? Or are you just believing what ebay claim? Considering ebay never do anything about the scammers i’ve reported down the years i’m somewhat sceptical.
millions of people just re register or use alternative idS to continue their scams
just removing the account achieves little
Having had a lot of scammers we used to put the username on the banned list, then quickly realised that buyers just add a number or letter to their username and can buy/scam again.
We now don’t ban anyone so we can keep a history of repeat scammers, that is more useful when asking eBay CS to help with problems.
The whole return / refund procedure is our main gripe with eBay and takes up the most time. Hopefully in the future, they will grant sellers a little bit more power to at least contest dishonest returns before imposing threats and timelines to issue refunds.
I chatted with an eBay insider last night, and while they were careful not to divulge anything that would get them fired, in part of our conversation I asked if there were any seller “hooks” or conditions in what was to be announced. I was assured, “There are no hooks. It’s what Sellers have been asking for for years, to be protected against fraudulent Buyers and MUCH MORE. I promise, we are asking for nothing.” So we shall soon see!
A couple quick thoughts:
1) Since eBay Managed Payments is eventually going to be compulsory, I believe with the strongest confidence the “multi-part” plan aspect naturally involves MP.
With eBay in full control of the payments funnel, eBay is in much better position to identify bad actors and pre-screen them out when they create new guest accounts.
2) Forever touting their “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning”, eBay would be remiss not to apply their AI/ML capabilities to screen and segment their 180 million buyers’ (and to be fair, the tens of millions of sellers) behaviors and return patterns.
I will be very surprised if in today’s announcement Wenig and co do NOT find a way to shoehorn a few of their favorite technology capabilities and buzzwords into the announcement.
3) Related to above, eBay should be tallying blocked buyers and of course seller-reported buyers to create a risk model (similar to a credit score) to segment buyers.
4) Lastly, with the “ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure” preventative action mindset, eBay would serve sellers well by enhancing the buyer blocking features set from the nearly worthless selections currently offered (to include metrics such as buyer return %, bad/negative feedback left by buyer %, etc. for sellers to more effectively screen potential buyer trading partners before problems occur)
Rational and reasonable suggestions
Though if ebay takes the hit in the pocket rather than the seller, they will never happen
Seeing is believing.
In 15 years wor so on the platform we haven’t seen eBay take so much as one action against the blatant buyer abuse that we have reported.
Actions speak louder than words.
@Alan
“You can SEE ebay being effective. Did you revisit the USER ID of the scammers you reported?”
Yep and that’s why it looks to me that ebay do nothing about them! They are still happily scamming away leaving tons of negs for items not received and the occasional revised positive when they’ve successfully scammed a seller into giving a refund.
As has been said previously, any action is toothless as the bad buyers simply circumvent any blocks – sometimes with eBay’s full assistance.
I had a buyer unable to purchase due to my blocks. According to the logs they tried four times. Then suddenly they were able to buy. After making enquiries I discovered that all they had done was to ring CS, tell them they wanted to buy something but were not able to, and CS there and then lifted *my* block and allowed them to purchase.
All I got was a “it’s a sale – we don’t understand your problem” response
eBay increased the seller penalty fee from 4% to 5% if you haven’t heard. Other than that there’s nothing new at all with this so-called update. They already have this policy and refuse to implement it. And it will be more of the same. This update is nothing more than smoke and mirrors coming from the ivory tower at eBay as usual. Truly disgusting company. So really, the only change here is another fee increase. What else is new?
Oh and forgot to mention, eBay also increased the FVF cap for Basic and Premium stores from $250 to $350. Bigger stores no change. See how they keep driving the nail into smaller sellers? This company is so desperate for every penny that they’ll stop at nothing by making underhanded and deceptive changes like this. It never stops.