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I always forget about ol’ Terapeak. I need to include that in my searches more often. I’ve noticed what you’re talking about on other retailer’s sites as well.
That makes sense, that it would be casting a wider net and including words pulled from places other than the title. I wonder why it only happens with some of my searches- most are fine and pull up the relevant results.
That’s a great idea. I was wondering how to verify the shipping options that we had on a listing.
That’s odd- according to the podcast, and from what I’ve seen, ebay seems to have largely fixed the glitch that caused the shipping page to select shipping options that the customer had not chosen. I’ve seen the problem that you’re describing when shipping internationally, where they can actually select a shipping option that shouldn’t be offered.
I’m having a similar problem with unpaid items. Had an international customer buy 5 items and didn’t pay. We filed an unpaid item case and they proceeded to buy 4 more items. Their feedback was full of negative (positive) feedback from sellers who hadn’t been paid. Right after that, ebay sent us an email saying that the sales had been cancelled due to suspicious customer activity.
They did not relist the items after cancellation and when we try to do this manually we get an error message – “Item cannot be accessed.” I’ve been handed back and forth to several customer service reps and they are beyond clueless. Unfortunately, that’s just the norm anymore when you have a problem that they can’t find on their script. Did you have any luck with them relisting the item you called about?
I had not checked out the Performance area of the site yet but that is great. At a glance, I’m seeing almost all the numbers I need for a given month. The only thing I’m unclear on is how they account for returns and refunds but I can get some of that info from the returns area under “manage all orders”. Thanks!!
In summation: It appears that, for some portion of this year, Ebay was reporting sales tax as a portion of our sales. If anyone can shed some light on how they account for that it would be great! I remember in a past podcast there was a discussion of how to make sure that you don’t report sales tax in your sales and I’ve been trying to stay on top of this but it isn’t easy when Ebay changes things up without letting us know.
When you go to the new “payments’ area, and then to the “reports” page, you can select a date range and get a in-depth breakdown for the last month. In September, many (but not all) of the transactions showed sales tax that had been collected. I believe that these taxes were included in the “Grand Total” number that you can access on the “Manage all orders” page. That seems to have changed in October’s numbers.
It’s pretty important to know if our monthly sales include taxes collected by Ebay, because if we don’t subtract them out, then we are paying taxes on income that we didn’t actually receive. It would be nice if Ebay sent us a simple breakdown so that we knew exactly how much we made in sales, how much we paid in shipping, etc. Maybe I’m overcomplicating things? Who knows.
I see what you mean there. So they are definitely still charging tax but if I’m correct, they stopped including the tax in our grand total sales for the month (unless it’s an in-state sale.) I get the grand total number by clicking the little blue “i” following the “results” near the top of the “manage all orders” page.
Regarding the big shipping charge correction- I had a weird overcharge this last week as well, far outside the normal $1-3 charge or refund we occasionally see. I used a standard size box that I get from Ebay, 16x12x8, with one dress inside. So, nothing that would make the box bulge out. If it was one inch larger in any direction it would incur the dreaded “balloon rate” for larger boxes.
We got an email after shipping the package saying that the measurements came in at 16.8x12x8 and thus we owed another $18. I sent an appeal to the link included in the email. Hopefully this is just a temporary kink in the system that gets worked out quickly. I’m glad to hear that it wasn’t just me experiencing this!
First off, thanks for always being so quick to respond to comments on the forum. I don’t know how you do it!
How do you access your sales numbers? I go to the “see all orders” section of the seller hub and look up the item total and grand total for the last month. My understanding was that the grand total included sales tax charged. They certainly appeared to be included and they were itemized in the CSV for September. (I get the monthly report from the reports are in the new payments section.) But the only sales tax included in the CSV were for the one in-state sale. So I assume that they are still charging sales tax but leaving that out of our sales numbers. I’m glad they did this, if that’s the case.
Does anyone know if we can totally eliminate shipping services that we don’t use from our account? We only offer USPS on our listings but that hasn’t stopped Ebay from making Fedex or UPS the default option on many of our sales. I thought that, at one time, we had to opt in to even use those carriers. Maybe they stopped that, I can’t recall.
Here is my unfounded theory: Maybe that want to push more people into using the “reply with offer” feature. You have to select that or actually pull up the listing to see what the price is.
I hate to sound like too much of an ingrate because sending offers has been a great feature. I just wish it went further. Many people still have this perception of eBay sellers as being slightly unreliable/unprofessional or not completely trustworthy. So when I can’t lay out all the numbers in front of them pre-sale, and instead ask them to rely on me for a shipping refund, it doesn’t always go over well. It’s so frustrating when a multi item deal fizzles out.
