The one thing that no one wants to do in Q4 – the busiest time of the year running from October to December, is make changes in how their processes work. That’s why it’s not unreasonable for the eBay world to have exploded last week when the eBay Awaiting dispatch order page changed to a new layout in Seller Hub.
The good news is that you may well have not noticed this if you use a third party solution for order management. eBay may well have considered that sellers with larger volumes often pay a third party to make dispatching orders a much less troublesome and more streamlined process than is available through the eBay site.
The bad news, if you use Seller Hub, is that the new eBay Awaiting Dispatch order page has changed and things might not be where you’re accustomed to them living.
The biggest complaint from many sellers is that they can’t now see or change any information without clicking into each order individually this was handy if you needed to for instance slightly reformat a buyers address (NB eBay still don’t use a Royal Mail PAF file to force buyers to enter addresses in a standardised format!). It’s also harder to combine multiple orders from the same buyer into a single shipment or to upgrade or downgrade the delivery method. Indeed, if for example you offer free postage, you now can’t even easily see if a buyer has paid for upgraded express postage. That’s about par for eBay because a buyer can’t see if you offer express postage from search results and has to click into your listing and then the postage tab and now you pretty much have to do the same in Seller Hub. That makes it harder to find orders with expedited delivery which you may very well want to process first leaving free economy postage orders for later in the day. Orders now all have eBay’s new order number which will be unique across all sellers and all eBay sites.
Issues the new system has thrown up include one seller who’s spotted that they’ve issued a number of invoices to Argos and Sainsbury’s as that’s the address that shows up for Click & Collect orders, the inability to bulk add notes, and only being able to mark a maximum of 50 orders as dispatched at one time. Buyers notes also don’t print on the invoice.
In fairness to eBay, many of the features are still available but you now have to use filters instead of visually scanning the page. For instance, you can now filter by “Awaiting express delivery” and another filter allows you to sort by “Buyer Name” or “Buyer Username” if you’re looking to combine orders. Not every feature you used to use is missing, there’s just a different way to access them.
One seller summed up the new system quite neatly suggesting it’s fine for private sellers with a couple of items to dispatch but intimating that it’s simply not fit for purpose for business sellers.
“I think this new system was designed with hobby sellers in mind who occasionally buy single postage from ebay – as that feature is so highly visible ” Buy Postage” & not for businesses that dont use ebay postage system & need fast bulk & copy/paste facilities & number of other features all missing from the new useless dispatch hub.”
They may well be right, and the aspect eBay often forget when making changes is that sellers run their businesses in many different ways and whilst a feature may be hardly used at all, for the one seller that does use it, it’s essential for their entire workflow. Taking it away or hiding it behind multiple clicks is what they consider a disaster. If that sounds like you then investing in a multi-channel management solution (even if eBay is the only site you sell on) gives you a buffer against the changes eBay make.
We all know that site changes have to be made on eBay and there will be many more to come in the future. We just hope there aren’t any more surprises to come in Q4.
35 Responses
After previously opting out of this carbuncle, we where hoping of another way out although it seems it’s being forced upon us.
The Buyer notes where handy for the warehouse staff, where add-ons where requested such as a Buyer wanting something extra & the office staff used the offer option & when purchased placed the note on the order.
Now these notes are no longer printed, it has already caused the warehouse to miss the extra part of the order & we had send it in separate parcel on Friday.
Another problem is you cant see which products you have relisted. Also the page totals at the bottom of the page have dissapeared.
eBay have now know about this problem for a week, and as far as I am aware not a single problem has been fixed. They are assuring people it is their top priority, but for a multi billion dollar company and one of the busiest sites on the internet, you would think that their IT team could at least put a temporary fix in place within 48 hours, or revert back to the old page for now, but to be in the same position a week later is shocking.
Someone in their IT department really needs to be held accountable for all the glitches and site problems, especially since Mar / Apr of this year. They seem to be getting more numerous and worse.
You also can’t download your sales to a .csv any more without going to File Exchange, which does it in a slightly different format.
Something I found useful was to filter sales by shop category, which they’ve also taken away.
I’ve not yet seen any seller on the forums that says they like it. Key things have been removed and it’s just incredibly dumb to do this at this time of year.
What seems daft to me is that you can print up to 200 orders at a time but it only allows you to mark 50 orders at a time as dispatched. So if a new order comes in as you are marking off the first 50 orders then it can be a problem.
I had this dropped on me last week after previously opting out as well. Getting sick to death of all these changes which I can’t see have any benefit to my business.
I can’t find a function in ORDERS DESPATCHED to search by my ebay category (useful for relisting or checking sales of a particular type of product.
Does anyone know a way of doing this??
The fact you are restricted to only marking off 50 orders at a time as dispatched is a joke. During our peak times we find that orders come in even as we are printing them so we tend to print off a 100 at a time and while they are printing we quickly selected that 100 and selcted ready to press confirm on the dispatch bit as soon as they finish printing. That was we never get one that crops up in the middle that we haven’t printed… but gets marked as such! Often the case with orders that havent been paid for immediately.
When you can be doing this 3 or 4 times you appreciate the fact that speed is critical. This is just another thing to slow us down and add extra time for errors. I mean what was the point? Who thought this was an improvement?
In fact who thought that dropping this all on us now and why is it suddenly imposed? I honestly think that they have no idea how their own company works…. even if they claim to be listening to their sellers… cough cough splutter.
Maybe this is why they aren’t promoting Christmas sales till the last minute… they know that their sellers will be under enough pressure which such rubbish as it is.
…. I have a sneaking suspicion that it won’t be long and ebay will be forcing sellers to use their own multi channel system rather than third party ones for selling on ebay ( obviously they have to aquire one first! ) Promising seamless interaction with other platforms etc! It sounds way off, but it is certainly a possibility with the way ebay is going. Rather than fix issues, they simply buy up the solutions, and then do nothing.
If the systems analysts and programmers were forced to run a test shop where they would go through the procedures of placing items and processing pseudo orders and with all, ALL, debugging shortcuts removed, you can bet your cats paws all, ALL, the systems on the eBay platform would operate very differently.
CHECK YOUR PAYPAL PAYMENT ADDRESSES!!!! The scam of altering PayPal payment addresses marginally is very much alive right now. You will not receive any alert from eBay that a PayPal payment address has been changed. You may be losing large amounts of money right now without knowing about it.
Everything is taking longer and requires more clicks and you really have to keep your mind on where you are.
We use the Sales Record # to track and file invoices post etc. you now need several clicks to do this simple job. The new 14 digit number is not even on the eBay VAT invoice using their print invoice system. Now it takes you back to the Hub overview page after entering tracking details, adding, you guessed it even more clicks and time!!!!!!¬!¬!¬!
Anyone else have problem with orders NOT BEING MARKED as dispatched when you select them and click “mark as dispatched” ??? Then you need no mark them AGAIN ?!?!?! Not a big deal if you need to mark all – but if you have 100 and you need to select 95 … and the only thing you can use is this new stupid order numbering system …
Also, when I try to use FileExchange to download “paid & awaiting dispatch” orders – sometimes I need to wait even 2-3 HOURS for it to process this request … BUT THERE IS A BIG PROBLEM – you CAN’T mark orders are dispatched before request is processed – as you’ll get empty/part file – you’ll ONLY get orders that are still awaiting to be dispatched – not orders at the time you’ve initiated the request …
Problems with the functionality of eBay?
Never….. who would have thought?
Great, cant add notes to print on invoice. We use it all the time as we sell presonalised products. Cant see who has left you feedback by sorting it, now run through all the orders peace meal.
Using the new format order numbers is great, we have to run up and down the list scanning to make sure you have actually selected the right order!!
Go Ebay make life easier for everyone NOT
It looks like some sellers are having success today getting eBay to change it back to the old layout. Thread:
https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Business-Seller-Board/New-layout-for-awaiting-dispatch-in-Seller-hub/td-p/6409212/page/8
Sorry you are all having problems, I don’t want to advertise on here but it might be worth you taking a look at my software One Stop Order Processing, it is a batch order processing software that works with eBay, Amazon etc and lets you process your orders in a unified way, using it would protect you from changes like this. We do update our interfaces but like to make sure that you can always go back to how it used to be and we are sellers ourselves and so properly appreciate the impact that a seemingly small change can make to a seller, particularly when you have to retrain staff.
This is our website :
https://1stoporders.com
We have a free trial on there so that you can try it out with no risk.
Cheers,
Jan
If this is the case (we had it on our Seller Hub last week & we called ebay and suddenly it was back to the old way) – can anyone recommend a new integrated system as the new one on ebay looked dreadful.
Tyler
we all have great products at a great price
tamebays bad enough these days with promos and pop ups
imagine the chaos if we all used the threads to promote
endorse and recommend is one thing
Promote for personal gain is another
Being honest we really are not that bothered about someone trying to gain custom to pay their bills, something were all guilty of
Its the slippery I dont want to advertise statement
Which gives the wrong message
Ebay are changing the order export file formats now as well, it seems as if they are doing it on an account by account basis, we had reports from American customers yesterday, Australian customers last night and UK customers yesterday and today, customers that worked fine yesterday, suddenly stopped working today. We have been running around fixing up programs and all are fine now but can’t be sure that eBay are done. There is no common format now over the exports, each region appears to have a different one. Some changes are fine, adding new fields for example but others are odd like changes to existing field names or just spelling.
We have naked Chinese ladies with shaven private parts promoted on our eBay pages masquerading as “art”. The seller username plastered all over the photographs. The item heading is “Shaved Asian Virgin after Bath Sexy Girl Woman Boobs Naked Cute Hot Oil Painting”.
Multiple complaints to me from my customers- a few of whom think we are to blame for promoting this. Our crime? We are trying to sell an antique painting which has eBay sponsored items on the listing. Obviously a promoted listing, cheers eBay.
BTW we have reported, but nothing seems to be done. No surprises really.
Where are our sequential record numbers!!
We need them and now they have gone
Where cand we amend the address format or details when the buyer gets it wrong?
This new layout has not been thought out, how can this be?
AND still, we cant identify repeat customers, a feature we really need.
Pointless and stupid changes. Fixing something that was not broken
A missed opportunity