eBay Hides Penalty Fee, Seller Says

by: Rexford

Wow.  Would love to hear more details about this.  Would also love to learn about how each of us can EASILY check to see if we are also subject to this draconian financial punishment.    The "Item Not As Described"  is regularly used and abused by buyers because they do not want to pay for postage to return an item.  

And what good does it do to report them for it?   Is reporting them just a "feel good" action, like pushing a crosswalk button that does not operate a crosswalk?

by: etectra

eBay's move to Managed Payments cost me 2% of eBay fees as they were no longer earned a rebate from the credit card company.

Contact your state attorney general; Congressman since they write the laws under which eBay is allowed to operate; FTC; Department of Justice.

Send a message to the Trump administration. In Trump's first term his administration was contacted by various people about eBay, Amazon and other companies importing millions of packages from China and bankrupting USPS in the process and he put an end to that.

eBay does not care if you were a Top Rated seller fo 13 years. The company is run by 100% sociopaths with no conscience. They've gotten rid of much bigger sellers than you without blinking a eye. eBay only does what is moral when they are made do it!

by: 1st Armored Div. 1971-1973

If your rate of 'Item not as described' return requests is evaluated in your service metrics as Very High in the evaluation on the 20th of the month in one or more categories, you will be charged an additional 5% on the final value fees for sales in those categories in the following calendar month. You can view your personalized service metrics on your Service Metrics dashboard in Seller Hub.

by: my2cents

The OP is missing some important details.  Ebay sends emails to sellers when they are get into trouble in the Service Metrics or the Defects on the Seller Dashboard, to let the seller know what is happening.

Ebay evals all sellers on the 20th of each month for the period ending the previous month that will become effective on the 1st of the following month.  So unless the OP was not reading emails from Ebay, they would have known ahead of time the fees were coming.

It is also important for sellers to monitor their Seller Dashboard and their Service Metrics numbers on a regular basis so they can try to be proactive if they see a problem brewing.

There is no penalty fee of 5.5%.  It is either 5% or 6%.

by: cfrphoto

Managed Payments reporting is a complete mess. Downloaded reports in CSV format are difficult to process, requiring multiple manual steps to correct Excel data type issues and remove extraneous characters from NULL fields. Ebay should provide options to download in Excel format and should provide complete transaction type documentation. Foreign currency amounts in reports should be zeroed out and reported in dollars as PayPal does. Some columns cannot be summed. As I said, a complete mess.

by: Lightning

If you are getting a lot of SNAD returns, THIS is your warning to check your metrics to see how close to the threshold you are. When things run smoothly, not a concern. When it gets rocky (you can tell the difference, I hope), do your due diligence, investigate, fix the problems, check your dashboard, or prepare to pay more than a third more in fees. EBay's fault? Not this time (just most times).

by: Snapped

“The OP is missing some important details.”

So let’s presume them?  Ok….

“ This Metric failure does not show up on the Seller Hub, and they don't inform you of your penalty.”.  

Ok, this seller is (presumed to be) unaware of anything related to eBay’s ‘penalty policy’.   Yet they are referring to a “metric failure”.  So would someone so clueless know about this published cause and effect by…what…osmosis?

The OP also does not state the “metric failure” to be SNAD, or INR, or anything really.  Ok, let’s presume then whatever it is, is their fault - must be - and that they have been clueless that, whatever the favored presumption is, it IS their fault.  Can’t be anything else, right?  Whether or not any email messages about it were ever sent or received.  

Though it seems another presumption exists that eBay’s stated intent to send one, or a slew of ‘em, happened without fail.  No eMail glitches here ever, right?  
Which also presumes the seller never reads their email.  And yet…” I'm a Top rated seller for 13 years, …”
So…presume THAT happened without ever having any threat of this whole poor performance thing occur, or that no emails are ever read (must be), and seller is thus unfamiliar with doing so?  Or maybe they just suddenly stopped.  Or maybe this top rated seller just decided to ignore THESE particular  - presumably received - emails.  
One of those has to be, right?  Logic be hanged.

But then there is this…a pretty important detail that it seems WAS included, yet somehow overlooked during all the presuming of the details that are presumed to be missing:
“ I've called eBay service twice with not one follow-up from them. “
Now, why would eBay not just simply autobot a response that a) points to the aforementioned presumed emails?, and b) points to the presumably ‘overlooked’ policy pages both reiteraterated in the OP, and helpfully provided by those would presume seller fault first?

Can’t presume to know the answer to that one.

Of course, this whole thing could be a big ol’ lie.  An AI fabrication to ratchet up the “noise” a bit.  Presuming such is needed of course.  This time.

by: cfrphoto

How many users have enough technical skills to untangle eBay Managed Payments reports. Are extraneous fees reported separately from the standard Final Value Fee in the new monthly reports? Unfortunately, the monthly reports, while nice summaries do not appear to be set up for downloads and may not provide enough detail to highlight extraneous fees like "not as described". That particular fee would be difficult to find in reports to sellers who accurately describe in listings.

by: Bill

This is just one of the reasons out of very many why after 27 years I do not sell on eBay anymore. The whole system is a complete mess and I do not have the time to go through a bunch of crap.