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Don’t relist. Flip locally. You’re talking about a $1k loss vs. a lifetime of never being able to see on eBay.
Xpost to Craigslist (or your regional equivalent) and FB Marketplace. OfferUp/LetGo. Be prepared to take a lower deal, but you should be able to move them fast if the right person gets a hold of your listing.
They’re trying to account for the switch from PDT->PST in November, but have it working retroactively on dates beforehand. Also, when I go to select an end time for a sale, I see: 10:30AM PST, 11:00AM PST, 11:30AM PST, then 11:58AM *PDT*.
There’s a laundry list of other date/time inconsistencies on eBay. Baffling.
I refunded a buyer and they complained that I was keeping the sales tax from them. Shouldn’t eBay be doing that automatically? I told them to call support and haven’t heard back.
Great info as always. Thank you!
Unfortunately the buyer already ran off since I refunded them, and I only got a picture of the item and the box out of them. Not great photo quality either – only one side of the box and a bad closeup of the item.
I was glad to see it wasn’t an automated return from eBay where they just print off a label right away. Next time I’ll use your trick of having them send a minimum amount of photos as a condition for the refund. Smart.
The process is simple and he clearly knows what he’s doing, I’m just not sure donations could cover his costs for offering anything other than one-off backups. IMO, effective backups are ones that are always happening or scheduled frequently, so when when eBay suddenly shanks a listing you did two days ago you’ll have the data backed up and ready to go. I toyed with the idea of launching my own service that did this very thing, but couldn’t lock down a price that was fair to the user and made it worthwhile for me to maintain.
Anyone can access a listing’s details via the API if you have the item ID. There may be a few details missing, but most of it’s there.
What’s really funny is that eBay offers up all the data you could possibly want about a listing (and more) via their developer API, but they give users basically no access to it at all. It would be trivial to dump it all out to a file and grab the images, so I don’t see a reason why eBay is cagey with it when just about every other site (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc) allow you to “take out” your data whenever you want for archival purposes. After the disappearing photo fiasco I expected them to offer such a service.
I have my inventory system syncing the stuff I care about (title, condition, used/new/etc, description, and images) and the rest is there if I wanted to store it. The one quirk is that eBay hides full-res images from users. I had to do some nutty work-around to get the “original” (the one that shows up when you’re hovering over an image) to download, and I’m not 100% sure how eBay feels about people doing that. If you’re willing to dive into it, there’s a Python package for the eBaySDK that it pretty easy to use. Once you set it up it’s as simple as calling GetActiveListings and then iterating through the pages of listings. It’s just JSON structs.
This is awesome. I love that eBay has these interesting little features tucked away for power users.
Interesting! You’re talking about eBay’s “file exchange” for editing PL rate, right? I was under the impression that feature had been taken away.
It’s easier for me to believe this was just a one-off bug than eBay employing some kind of low-level algorithm that somehow interprets minor quality differences between two identical items only mentioned in text, especially since it was wrong in this case and gave the worse item a higher TR.
I’m in agreement as far as search placement goes. I’m not trying to crack the code on it, only get some understanding of where I need to be putting the rate if I’m competing against a dozen+ listings with 1000+ quantity sold.
Yes, exact same item with a different price due to some difference in quality I felt was big enough to split it off from a quantity listing. All item specifics were the same since I wrote up one listing and then just made a copy for the second one.
I agree with you on the other points re: not worrying about TR and just applying a global rate that might be over/under the TR. The point, I guess, is that we should be able to trust these numbers have some kind of math behind them. If I plug in two identical items and the rate comes back different, then it’s just a random number generator that occasionally spits out something something resembling logic. I have the same critique of Service Metrics and Guaranteed Delivery where the information seems unreliable or otherwise manufactured to push you to “do better”, as the former almost always says I’m “above average” whereas my return rate is quite reasonable given what I sell, and the latter constantly says I’ll qualify for the program upon the next review, but I always get rejected for some unknown reason.
I want to trust eBay, but stuff like this bothers me. When I was breaking into a really tough category a year or so ago I ended up trusting the high TR because I assumed it had some logic behind it, but now I wonder if that was at all accurate – could I have halved my rate and remained in the top 10?
I decided to change the price of listing A and the rate dropped to 4.2% (from 7%) to match listing B. I changed the price back and the rate stayed at 4.2%.
Price was the only difference between these items. Listing A was cheaper, but had a higher trending rate. Not cool.
They’re both still sitting at 4.2%. The mysterious black box of eBay puzzles me.
@Retro – Thanks for checking. I’m hoping others can chime in and confirm whether this was a one-off accident.
I tried to get my limits raised when I first started. They upped the limit on the total amount I could list, but wouldn’t remove category restrictions, so I could only have X amount listed in a category for something like a month. eBay said this was non-negotiable.
Maybe it’s different now? Or maybe if you open a store they’ll lift it automatically? It’s unfortunate that the reps just fed you false information.
I would also go with GovDeals or something else. They allow payment via PayPal. No idea what the backend looks like.
