There have been issues affecting eBay sellers' ability to print labels through PayPal. I received one letter on Sunday that demonstrates the friction glitches can cause between sellers and their buyers, particularly when there's no documentation of a problem:
There is an issue affecting sellers who use UPS shipping through their Paypal account. Many folks, myself included, are unable to print UPS labels and get only an error message "PayPal Shipping is not available. We apologize for the inconvenience". I would like to stress that the most frustrating part of this technical issue is that neither Paypal or Ebay has posted this issue to their system announcements board. When a buyer asks why their shipment is delayed sellers have no official bulletin to reference and the buyer must be thinking that it's just an excuse the seller has fabricated.
Included with this were links to 3 threads:
First, started December 13, 2007, in the Technical Issues board.
Second, started January 10, 2008, in the PayPal board.
Third, started December 8, 2007 in the Packaging & Shipping board.
I also received a letter on Sunday from a seller of bullion who says it's almost impossible to use PayPal shipping labels for non-PayPal funded transactions.
Dear Ina,
Here is a software glitch that has been going on for many months. I won't bore you by recounting my many attempts to address it.
I am a seller of bullion. High price, low margin. I successfully talk most buyers into not using PP (really effective when PP is not an option).
Here is the glitch. I quickly clear the buyers check, go to print shipping label using PP shipping only to be told that my ebay and PP accounts are not linked. If it were just a matter of hitting the link button in PP, that would be the end of it. Too bad said button fails to stay green once that page is left.
OK, I will detail some tries to resolve. Nine emails to PP, zero responses. 5 phone calls, some claimed to write a tech report, others nicely claimed I was computer illiterate, and one rep suggested I use another shipping service like USPS.com. Discussed with power-seller rep. He replied that he has heard of this before and feels bad but has no influence to report (come to thing of it, he has no influence in just about any matter discussed.)
I would have switched to USPS.com however, their minimum service is Priority Mail. If I make $2 on a silver bar and charge $2 to ship, using Priority Mail Flat envelope at $4,60 it doesn't take a Harvard MBA to see the result.
This glitch is using IE 7.0. If using FireFox, I have a workaround that works most of the time so I will share it here.
Open ebay page to print shipping link - Open second PP page and turn on shipping link button - dash back to ebay page and hit ship button. Works most of the time.
Final thoughts. Ironically, this issue first appeared last year when ebay was pushing and promoting using PP shipping with a big prize.
Conspiracy theory is that this is not fixed to discourage sellers taking payments other than PP.
eBay posted an announcement about the problem on Monday at 11 am, and pronounced it fixed an hour later. Feel free your comments on eBay's handling of the problem.
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eBay Problems with PayPal Shipping Labels
