eBay Multi-User Account Access is now live in the US, account owners can give employees and contractors limited access to their eBay accounts in order to manage listings.
The good news
The good news is that eBay Multi-User Account Access can enable employees to be invited to manage listings with two levels of rights. The ability to create listing drafts and the ability to publish and revise listings.
This removes the ability of an employee or contractor to press the bomb button on eBay and click the link to “Close my account” which is long overdue.
The bad news
The biggest challenge eBay has facing them at the moment is the ability for fraudsters to edit the eBay PayPal payment address. We’ve identified close to half a million pounds loss from sellers who have fallen victim to this fraud and, unless the business owner is to verify each and every listing created and handle all revisions personally, they will still have to entrust this capability to their employees and contractors and by extension the ability for fraudsters to edit listings.
eBay sellers have been calling for eBay Multi-User Account Access for decades and eBay is far behind other sites such as Amazon and PayPal in offering different levels of access rights. This is a good start but eBay need to accelerate the program to bring it to other countries and to extend the rights that can assigned to users. Rights are needed for order management and responding to eBay messages for example are critical operations that employees and contractors will need full access to the eBay account to perform. Similarly post sales returns and refunds require full access to the eBay account. What is likely to happen is that eBay Multi-User Account will be of limited usefulness in it’s early days as it’s only applicable for eBay listing creation and, if the same employee or contractor needs any other rights, which in many cases will be essential, they’ll end up still being given unfettered access to the full eBay account.
Perhaps the best short term solution for eBay sellers with multiple employees and contractors who need account access is still to use a third party management tool and only give access through this, retaining access to the most critical areas of eBay to themselves.
How eBay Multi-User Account Access does work?
The way eBay Multi-User Account Access works is that eBay Seller Hub users can delegate access to other users. When invited, employees and contractors create their own eBay account which is then linked to the business with user-specific permissions. When a delegatee logs in and switches to another user’s account, they see a limited view of their Seller Hub and can access only those functions (create listings or create and revise listings) to which they have been granted permissions.
2 Responses
this has been available in the US for a few months, I called ebay concierge in the UK and they have never heard of it, we have been waiting for years for this simple option why can it not be activated now?
Same, it’s a joke that this hasn’t been a feature considering the size of some sellers on eBay. We have to give certain members of staff access and they can literally do anything with the account should they choose.