SUMMARY:
It's a fault in the Excluded Country programming which ebay knows about and can't be bothered fixing.
BACKGROUND:
When COVID started impacting postal deliveries in 2020 I added counties where deliveries were not happening to my existing Excluded Countries list.
When things settled down and deliveries were getting through to those countries again, I tried to remove them from my Excluded Countries list, however the system wouldn't retain any edits I made to the list. I tried editing the list in my default postage policy in "Manage your business policies" and also in the various specific postage policies in "Manage your business policies". I also tried editing the postage policy from within a specific listing, which when saved is supposed to update the relevant policy on all active listings. None of this worked.
Naturally I contacted ebay for help. The ebay consultant made a few suggestions that he said should fix the problem. I tested these suggestions while I had him online and they didn't appear to work. He said it took a while for the system to reflect the changes and to check it the next day.
A few days later nothing had changed so I contacted ebay again. Went through the same rigmarole with 2nd consultant. He suggested creating an entirely new default postage policy with no country exclusions and to apply that policy to the relevant listings. This sounded promising so I tried that. Again it didn't make any difference. (Perversely, while it didn't unblock any of the countries I wanted to unblock, it allowed a customer from a country AustPost still can't delver to (Turkey) to buy a WHOLE HEAP OF STUFF which I then had to refund - to make it worse he was one of those r*tards who instead of using the cart buys and pays for 25 items separately, so I had to do 25 separate refunds F*F*S).
Sick of the whole rigmarole of trying to get ebay to fix it, I let it go for a while. Then several months ago I was contacted by a customer in Norway wondering why he couldn't buy my stuff any more. This prompted me to contact ebay for the 3rd time. This time the consultant admitted that it was an issue ebay was aware of and that they were working on solving it. She said in the meantime all she could suggest was adding ebay usernames of customers in countries concerned to the "buyer requirements exemption list". (If you think about it, you'll see that this is hardly a do-able "fix" - it's only feasible if one of them contacts you.)
Naturally I asked if it is an issue ebay is aware of why aren't sellers simply told this when asking for help, instead of wasting hours of time on pointless fixes that don't work. She assured me that she would make sure all their help desk people would be alerted to do this in future.
IMPACT ON BUSINESS:
The main impact has been that after having to block several countries as a result of temporary COVID-related delivery issues, I have not been able to unblock those countries because of glitches in ebay's systems. These are countries that I previously had been getting quite a lot of sales from. Consequently I have been losing a quantity of sales which based on previous data would amount to a couple of hundred dollars a month at least. Quite apart from loss of sales to existing customers, an unknowable quantity of potential new customers are lost both because they now cannot see my listings, or if they do, they see a great big red "seller doesn't ship to -----" alert on every listing.
Ebay has therefore cleverly contrived to set in cement a real world problem that was temporary, and make it permanent. So any loss that would have been just COVID-related, in now ebay-related.
Ebay is one of the richest privately owned entities in the world, and sorting out an IT issue like this can't be that hard. The only answer is they can't be bothered, and the only thing that will change that is if pressure is brought to bear on them.
Strategies I am going to try are:
- informing media (especially tabloid outlets like Today Tonight & A Curent Affair & the ABC)
- informing federal MPs (any sales outside of Australia are exports and earn export $$$ - the aggregate loss over all AU ebay traders must be quite high)
