eBay overcharge 120% on varation purchase
Buying from multi-variation listings is never a pleasant experience, well that is if you want to buy more than one variant. Yesterday I was foolish enough to purchase seven items from one listing and as always eBay make it nigh on impossible to buy multiple variations. Then for my trouble I was massively overcharged on the postage.
I’d like to make it clear from the outset that I don’t blame the seller in the slightest. It’s not their fault that eBay make the buying experience so unpleasant and it’s not their fault I was massively overcharged on postage.
When you want to buy multiple variations eBay provide no mechanism for doing so. As soon as you add one item to your shopping basket you can adjust the quantity pretty easily – eBay even highlighted that I had added the “Last One” of a particular variation to my basket. What eBay don’t make easy is for the buyer to say they’d like to purchase more variations.
There’s still no easy method to go back to buy more variations and unlike most shopping carts on the Internet when you “Add to basket” eBay insist on taking you to your shopping basket expecting you to check out. Why I can’t add items to my shopping basket and stay on the page I’m currently viewing I do not know.
Having struggled to purchase seven items from one multi-variation listing I was then faced with the postage cost being massively inflated. For an item cost of £1.50 the seller specified a perfectly reasonable postage cost of £1.10 plus £0.40 for each additional item.
That’s not what eBay charge though, eBay count each variation purchased as separate times and charged me £1.10 seven times over. Instead of the seller specified £3.50 postage eBay gouged me for £7.70. I had to pay 120% more for postage than the seller wanted to charge me.
I know I’m being ripped off on postage and I’m not happy. I know I could have contacted the seller and asked them to reduce the postage amount. I know I could have chosen not to make the purchase. I know there’s an outside possibility the seller might refund some of the postage. I also know it’s totally eBay’s fault.
Purchasing on eBay should be a zero touch transaction. I don’t want to communicate, I don’t want to talk and I’m pretty sure the seller just wants to list and ship and has no interest in discussing postage with me. Quite simply eBay’s buying mechanism is antiquated and arduous and even with the shopping basket hasn’t really changed much over the last 10 years as far as checkout goes. They scrapped 3rd party checkouts preventing sellers from being able to correct eBay’s shortcomings so we’re stuck with what eBay have cobbled together over the years.
Questions for eBay
1) Why send me to the shopping basket every time I purchase an item?
2) Why not provide me an easy route back to buy more items from the same multi-variation listing?
3) Why not fix postage so I’m charged the amount for additional items as specified by the seller?
4) If I was to leave Negative/Neutral Feedback or Detailed Seller Ratings due to the overcharged postage would you notice and do you protect the sellers of all multi-variation listings when more than one variation is purchased?
I’m guessing that eBay’s standard answer is that the seller should offer free post to eliminate the problem. That simply means they’d be even more uncompetitive as “free” means “included”. The truth is that they don’t have a solution.
I don’t expect answers from eBay. I don’t expect they could fix the problems in the near term however much they wanted to, the site is simply to big and complex. Sadly I also don’t expect buyers to be happy being overcharged for postage and I don’t expect sellers to be happy getting dinged on their “How reasonable were the P&P charges?” Detailed Seller Ratings.
No one is winning, something needs to be done.
Chris Dawson says
9:53 am on 03/08/2012
Just received the following through eBay highlighting what a pain multi-variation listings are for sellers:
Thank you for buying your purchase and for your payment. Unfortunately ebay only reduces the postage on their invoice for the same variation that is bought so they have overcharged you by £3.70. I will refund this back into your paypal account shortly and will post these items to you today – please allow 4-6 days for them to reach you.
What a waste of their time going through every sale just in case they need to do a partial postage refund.
board_surfer says
9:58 am on 03/08/2012
On the bright side you found a good seller.
Chris Dawson says
10:01 am on August 3rd, 2012
You’re right, great products, great service, great seller. They’d get a gold medal if the Olympics included selling.
Just a shame eBay would be out of the medals and probably knocked out in the heats
Stuart says
11:18 am on 03/08/2012
This is why we offer FREE postage on everything, even without variations it was a nightmare when people purchased more than one item!
Perhaps that is why ebay don’t do anything for postage on this to encourage you to offer free postage?
Clarky says
6:46 pm on August 3rd, 2012
This does detract from the problem slightly as had you have been the merchant in question you would still have charged Chris 7 times the postage, he would just not have had the information to hand, this would also make you more than likely more expensive then a competitor with a reduced additional rate.
With bundles still missing in action and the inability to discount the item price having even a nominal postage charge to be able to reward repeat or multiple purchasers with some small discount seems like the better idea.
There is a way around the ebay postage fiasco but it requires global settings or differing postage rules, we migrated to a 3 tier postage (letter , packet, courier) system a while back to solve the issue and it seems to be working.
Chris Dawson says
8:10 pm on August 3rd, 2012
The way I see it is very simple. It doesn’t matter if you can get around the problem or if free post semi-fixes the issue.
What matters is that if eBay have a feature, such as postage discounts for additional items, then that feature should work.
marc w says
6:19 pm on 03/08/2012
As previously stated postage is not free. It means included, which also means it’s inflated to cover the ebay FVF that will be applied to the postage element of it. It’s the customer that loses out in the end as the cost is passed on to them so they pay more for their items than they would if ebay put this right.
I try not to buy anything that has free post, as I know it could have been made cheaper by at least the postage final value fee.
We also have terrible problems with the shopping basket(case) and we spend a lot of unecessary time processing partial refunds and advising customers of this. Customers appreciate our honesty and often message back, especially when we point out it was ebay’s fault not ours.
Gerry007 says
8:49 pm on 03/08/2012
.
Actually we all have this problem & all a buyer has to do is ask for the total.
Sometimes, if we see a buyer has paid to much, we upgrade the postage to 1st class, if of course they only paid 2nd.
Also, sometimes [and with our forever increasing claims of INR] we will dispatch recorded delivery for piece of mind, allround.
Chris Dawson says
12:07 am on August 4th, 2012
You say “all the buyer has to do is ask for the total”, but that’s the crux of the problem – buying on eBay is not a zero touch transaction.
I can’t be bothered. Other buyers will forget to log back in to see if the seller has sent a total and not pay. Some sellers will be prompt in sending a total and there’s not time limit as to how long it may take. Then of course there’s those that simply overpay and sellers refund, or sellers don’t refund and buyers may be upset and may ding feedback.
eBay just need to fix it and then everyone can breath a sigh of relief and get on with buying and selling
katakitty says
7:15 am on 04/08/2012
I’m giving up on MVL, nothing but a pain whether I’m selling or buying.
This week I ordered 5 lots of jiffy bags all from the same ebay seller. The 2 with Free post have been delivered, another had 24 hour courier no sign of it and the other 2 with Free 2nd Class are now estimated 6th to 8th August.
If I’d been that seller I would have just upgraded the whole order to 24 hour courier but I’m now left to wait around for 2 extra deliveries.
ebuyerfb says
7:44 am on 04/08/2012
As a developer MVLs are painful.
You can’t write to multiple variations of the same item within separate calls quickly. If you do accidently have two outgoing API calls that revise two different variations you have no idea what the results are going to be. You may get one revised, you might get both revised, or you might get part of your revision on one and part of your revision of the other. And to make matters worse you’ll get acknowledgements of each and notifications of each even if that state never actually exists.
You can’t mark a variation as out of stock if it hasn’t made an sales. Setting quantity to 0 on such a variation deletes it forever.
You can’t relist or list an item with variations with a quantity available of 0 for a variation. You have to delete those 0 quantity variations forever meaning if an app wants to relist your MVL listings it better keep track of everything including storing your images just in case you ever restock or else just delete them (I chose the later since I don’t write listing apps).
MVLs always show the sum of the quantity available for all variations if no variation is selected and the real quantity for those listings is obscured within embeded javascript. A regular listing hides the true quantity in the HTML so it can be scraped or accessible via extensions.
And on the site MVLs are always presented in order of creation rather than any sort of alphabetical or numerical ordering. This makes it confusing to your buyers if they are looking for a particular size you sell and you didn’t happen to stock them in the right order.
Marshall says
7:04 pm on August 6th, 2012
Some of these are correct, but others are incorrect and are dependent on the software developer properly handling the information. The eBay integration can be very challenging, but many of these situations can be handled if the software is developed in a way that lines up with the eBay functionality. While that can’t do anything about the UI experience on the eBay site, it can make the management of listings more efficient and reliable. We’ve spent a lot of time optimizing performance for various areas around variation processing and have even more that we’ve identified for future improvements.
ebuyerfb says
7:46 am on August 10th, 2012
Point out the ones that are incorrect. If eBay has changed something since I created my implementation I’d like to know.
Marshall says
11:11 pm on August 10th, 2012
While the set to 0 on unsold will remove it instead of mark it as “sold out”, it does not inhibit a seller from adding that back later. Your original text could be interpreted as inhibiting addition of that child item at a later time, in case someone was concerned they’d be prohibited from adding it back later if they acquired additional quantity. The issue of delete on relist is the same, but it’s not a problem if you’re the listing app since you still have all of that information from the original product information defined by the seller. There might be a reason, but I’m not sure why an app that’s not a listing app would be removing all quantity from a child item yet might want to add it back later. If it’s that far along in management, it probably encroaches really close on being a listing app.
The race condition on making two independent edit requests at the same time is still there (and very bad because they both get a Success response even if they ultimately lose the race condition). I’m the one that discovered that in the initial development of variations support when it caused me a number of issues. Multiple child items can be edited at once when combined into a single API request, which is also more efficient in overall processing.
Quantity and price information on variation child items is easily available in the API data. While it’s somewhat obscured and poorly displayed in the HTML display, the XML is quite clear and easy to extract the quantity and price information for each child.
Ordering of the options in the drop-down list is up to the definition of information submitted by the developer in the XML data when listing. Rendering of that information in the eBay item listing is based on the order of the option values submitted, not the order of the child items created (though that may be the default if the ordering rules aren’t specified — I always specify them). You can sort them however you like before submitting them — I have a ton of logic in place to make smart decisions automatically for my sellers and relieve them of the manual configuration burden.
ebuyerfb says
8:32 am on August 11th, 2012
I did not mean it couldn’t be added back later. Though there was a bug at one point where deleted variations could not be readded (this was not intentional though). However in my case sellers do not use my software to define their products. I’m aware it is expected for Channel Advisor to do this. All I simply do is manage stock levels. Hence the pain point there. I do keep track of the original listing id so as long as it still exists in eBay’s system GetItem can be called to retrieve what used to be there (assuming it wasn’t previously deleted). It would still be much nicer if it was always there in the current listing to begin with.
When did you discover the race condition issue? I found it out back in July or August of 2009 and eBay had no idea what I was talking about. Much later they added a warning in the documentation regarding this saying to be careful and avoid modifying multiple variations in different threads at the same time. It isn’t really a huge problem for me as I came up with a simple solution the day after I discovered it but it does slow things down. Much later I made it so it would do all variations at once (if applicable) within a single call. But it is very common for this call to fail due to revalidation so then all variations must be done individually and slowly once again.
What I was hinting at with regard to the HTML was in cases where the API isn’t being used. An example would be a simple Chrome extension that manipulates whatever is on the page. I developed one that I use to see the real quantities in listings. Yes, I could easily use the API in that case but that would violate the license, I don’t want to expose tokens or app ids, and don’t want to mess with tunneling it through my own server when the data is already there.
Mark B says
4:40 am on 10/08/2012
I would hope eBay will see and act on this. Hint hint.
CJ says
11:40 pm on 29/08/2012
Yes I find this very annoying.. I got a lot less hassle off customers when my products were listed as free postage, but then I lost out on extra fees and sales as competitors headline price was lower.
Wish they’d fix this sh*t.