eBay's secret messages

19/03/2008 at 16:34

Are your buyers trying to tell you something? It’s entirely possible they are and that you know nothing about it. Powerseller Allan from TropicanaUK alerted us to a potentially disastrous problem for buyers and sellers alike. Buyers now have the facility to add notes to sellers on checkout. However, unless sellers know that these notes might exist, and do a lot of digging to find them, they may never see them.

Notes could be a useful feature. For changes of address or colour options or the perennial favourite “please wrap well and leave feedback”, there are lots of things buyers like to tell sellers on checkout. But if we don’t know what they’re saying, or even that they could be saying it, this facility is worse than useless. How many times has a buyer said to you “but I asked you…”, and you’ve thought “ah, don’t blame me for your mistake!” Now I know what happened to those notes. I just didn’t see them, because I didn’t know they could be there.

There is nothing in SMP or My Messages or My eBay to say that a note from a buyer exists. Instead, sellers have to open up each individual order details page, and check for a very small link at the bottom. Even getting to the order details is a long-winded process: they can be found via My eBay Sold Items (on the drop down list for each item), or from SMP by clicking the checkout date on the Sales Record, or from the link at the top of a closed listing for a single item, or from the Purchases page for a closed listing for multiple items. Obviously if you’ve sold more than one item in a day, this is going to make processing your orders much, much more onerous.

Notes from buyer on Order Details page
click to embiggen

Just to compound the confusion, the link doesn’t appear if there is no note from a buyer (or at least, we think that’s what’s happening).

A thread on the UK Powerseller forum [PS signin required] suggests that Allan’s not the only one with the same problem. At best, this wastes everyone’s time as sellers chase buyers for information they’ve already supplied; at worst – as in Allan’s case – this can mean that a parcel ends up in the wrong hemisphere.

eBay desperately need to make these messages more visible to sellers: personally I’d like to see them show up in My eBay and in SMP, and be printed out on the SMP packing slip too. That way, there’s no chance I’m going to miss them! In the meantime, I’ll be the one clicking through my orders, one by one, with a very unhappy look on my face.