eBay is becoming more and more paranoid about "oustide eBay" transactions. We are bumping into this more and more often with situations where the buyer requests a (usually quite reasonable) modification after the sale.
The silly thing is that once a sale is made as a seller you have the buyers email address and dealing with this is simple - you just contact them directly (ie in its attempts to prevent "off ebay" transactions ebay actually forces you to do what they are trying to prevent. Not only that, it's not too hard to work around most of the barriers anyway).
The obvious solution would be for eBay to provide sellers with the tools to deal with issues inside eBay (that's what we would prefer).
Instead they prefer to take the "ostrich approach" and pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist (rather than trying to exist in it).
A good example - we recently had a relatively large purchase where the buyer paid the list price rather than use the best offer option we had available for bulk purchases. We couldn't reduce the price after the sale ... the only practical way to deal with it was for us to bill the buyer directly and to mutually cancel the eBay transaction - so eBay missed out on the fees completely - and the buyer paid us via bank deposit to boot!
Just dumb!
