In today’s UK Spring Seller Release, eBay announced three Selling experience updates to assist sellers who do the right thing.
Item Location Misrepresentation
Last month, eBay announced new enforcement measures against listings and sellers who don’t comply with the eBay Item Location Misrepresentation policy. This isn’t a change in policy, but a doubling down on eBay’s efforts to enforce it as well as enforcement on Good ’til Cancelled listings from June.
“It’s important for sellers to accurately state the location of their items so that buyers can use eBay’s search filters to correctly select listings based on location. When this doesn’t happen, it creates an unfair marketplace for sellers and a disappointing and potentially misleading experience for buyers.
The change means that all sellers are now required to select a postal option that matches the item’s location. Sellers are no longer able to create new listings or revise listings where the item location and postal service don’t match. In addition, identified Good ‘Til Cancelled listings won’t renew further and will be ended in June.”
– eBay UK Spring Seller Release
Introducing Easy Relisting
If you sell an item, but it’s returned or the sale is cancelled, eBay will help you get the item back on sale as quickly as possible.
From May, as you accept and complete a return or cancellation, there’ll be a pre-checked box asking if you want to relist the item:
- If you do, simply leave it as is and your listing will be put back on eBay exactly as you had it before it sold. Please note that the usual relisting and other fees would still apply.
- If you don’t want to relist, for example if a return comes back damaged, you can simply uncheck the box and decide what to do next.
There are scenarios where easy relisting isn’t appropriate and so eBay wil only offer this in the following circumstances:
For cancellations
- When the buyer has asked the seller to cancel.
- When the seller cancels the sale for “Buyer requested cancel” or “Problem with buyer’s address” reasons.
For returns
- When there’s buyer remorse such as “Buyer changed their mind” reasons, following which we know the item has been returned and a full refund has been offered.
You’ll also be able to set your preference for easy relisting within APIs, but the default will be off. This will be most applicable for sellers using the auction style listing format.
Updated order number format
Starting in summer 2019, eBay are introducing a more user-friendly order number format than the one currently used in eBay current APIs to help you align with the online retail marketplace. Each transaction on eBay will have a new order number attached to it, which your buyer will see. The new order numbers will follow the transaction through its journey from you to your buyer and will keep things simple for you and your buyers:
- The new number will be unique across all users and sites
- It will help buyers and sellers to track their orders with just one number from start to finish
- It will be unique for at least 7 years
- It will speed up customer support for buyers and sellers
The updated order numbers will appear in the “Order details” section of your View Order Details page, Seller Hub, reports, emails, APIs, post-transaction records, and other locations so you can efficiently track and manage your orders.
eBay will support the updated order number format in the new version of their APIs and continue to support order numbers in our current API for backward compatibility. Sellers and developers will need to upgrade to the new version of our APIs to get the new order format and align with details that will be displayed in the user experience. You will see the same information in both the user experience and new version of the APIs that buyers see on their email receipts and in other user experience flows.
For further details check the Unique Order Number page in the Seller Centre.
