In an unprecedented bit of overselling, the official Hasbro store on eBay.com has had 30,826 eBay orders cancelled in one day.
The back story is that Wizards of the Coast released ‘Magic: The Gathering War of the Spark‘ on eBay Hasbro Store. They had a limited quantity of 12,000 sets printed and they sold out within minutes. The problem is that the eBay listing didn’t shut down once 12,000 had sold and somehow a total of 42,826 orders were placed. This leaves Hasbro with 30,826 eBay orders cancelled in one day which has to be some sort of notorious record.
Naturally there are a lot of upset customers – 30 odd thousand of them with almost three quarters of all orders being cancelled. eBay and Hasbro have put out a joint statement on twitter apologising and confirming that the first 12,000 orders placed have been accepted and will be shipped but that they are working to ensure all subsequent orders are canceled and refunded.
At $249.99 per set, this is a $7.7 million order cancellation which may also be a record on eBay. Out of the $10.7 million paid by consumers, only $3 million will be retained as valid sales. It’s likely to take some time to process all the refunds but best advice is not to put in PayPal claims as that could only slow the refund process down.
eBay have emailed all individual buyers who’s orders will be cancelled apologising and promising a virtual gift card towards a future purchase and letting consumers know that eBay are working with Wizards of the Coast to send everyone who’s orders were cancelled ‘something special’.
Mistakes happen on eBay, but by any standards this $7.7 million 30,826 eBay orders cancelled in one day is a blinder.
Many thanks to Tamebay reader Dan for the heads up on this story.
20 Responses
OOOOh dear.
I wonder if the buyers paid via pay pal
Cos, https://channelx.world/2019/04/paypal-fees-to-be-kept-when-us-sellers-process-refunds.html, and if paypal kept ALL the fees, that’s a lot of money to lose !!!
lol… can’t wait to see a screen shot of their metrics next month. Oh and the phone call to c.s to get the negs removed will be a very long one!
Article misses that the first 12,000 orders were apparently cancelled, so anyone in that first wave that didn’t re-order when it came back up are apparently screwed, while anyone who ordered after that has their money tied up for no apparent reason. Refunds are supposed to happen, but there’s been radio silence since last week.
Will they receive a defect on their account for every cancellation?
That’s a lot of PayPal 20p’s to lose if nothing else! ?
If this was a small business, the account would be flagged and a freeze put on the PayPal account. The seller would then have their account on below standard.
Because it’s not a small seller, they get protected.
Talk about double standard.
Interesting how Hasbro has no negative comments relating to this listing but plenty of “positive” ones from buyers unhappy about the cancellations. Looks like eBay blocked the possibility of leaving negative feedback. Double standards as usual. Big boys, as usual, get special treatment.
@simon, if eBay are fixing the feedback of larger sellers is this legal? What about the Fair Competition Act of 1998? Is this not protecting a dominant market position for Hasbro ? Way more intelligent people than me may want to draw conclusions, but it doesn’t look good for sure, if true.
Negative feedback started rolling in now. One of the comments is gold: “Product launch was Fyre Fest for nerds”
The problem here is that eBay seems to not be getting most of the blame for this disaster. Most buyers seem to think that it’s Hasbro’s fault but they have no control of order processing. Hasbro didn’t over-sell 30+ thousand units, eBay did! Seems that eBay can’t count correctly unless it’s fixing their buyer numbers and financial results!
The negatives are slowly disappearing. They had around 1500 30 minutes ago. Now it’s barely 1200. Crooks
So if Paypal is now keeping their 2.9% fee (plus $0.30 per transaction) that means Paypal made $232,736.30 from Hasbro and eBay’s mistakes.