eBay notified sellers it had provided them with wrong addresses to send their orders. Incredibly, it had done so for nearly 2 weeks, going back to April 7th – and it was unable to tell sellers which orders they had sent (or had yet to send) that had bad addresses.
An eBay moderator acknowledged the problem on Thursday, April 18th, which we reported on the EcommerceBytes Blog. On Friday, eBay sent the following message to some sellers:
“On April 7, an issue generated errors in the shipping addresses associated with some buyer orders. Please confirm the buyer’s shipping address by reaching out to the buyer on any orders placed after April 7 that have not yet been sent. If a mismatch is found, please cancel the order and relist the item. eBay will protect your performance for canceled orders, remove any resulting negative feedback and refund associated fees.”
A seller who received the message said they had contacted customers and found incorrect address information, which they have had to manually correct. “There is no information from eBay about when we can trust the their system again and infact after a long conversation by phone with an eBay customer service agent, I discovered that they also had no idea about why this has happened, how long before it is fixed and what may have happened to shipments made between 7th April and today (18th of April),” the seller wrote in a thread on the eBay discussion boards on Friday.
Sellers were quite concerned about how they would identify and fix orders sent to their buyers. “What about items I’ve already shipped that are maybe headed to the wrong address,” one seller asked. “I didn’t see anything in the message about eBay covering our losses in those cases.”
Sellers had lots of questions about the ramifications of eBay’s error, including how widespread it was, whether they should reach out to customers they’d already shipped items to, and whether despite the assurances in eBay’s message, they might suffer negative consequences. On Friday morning, eBay’s moderator wrote in one thread, “I am checking on this with different Product teams and once I have more insight I will let you know,” but that was his last post on the matter as of Saturday morning.
A frustrated seller turned to the eBay for Business Facebook page to comment on a post, “Why doesn’t eBay update people to problems with the site. orders going to the wrong address , changing our shipping charges, now the site is down and I cant list. but no you show these videos that are nice and happy but not really all that helpful.”
An eBay moderator responded, “Hey there Michelle! Thanks for reaching out and sharing those concerns with us. We do try and communicate via email when there is a site wide issue that could impact a large group of members. Both topics you mentioned did have corresponding emails that went out to the impacted members. We know it can be frustrating when things don’t work as they should, or go as planned. We’d be happy to assist however we can. Feel free to reach out via private message with more information, and we can chat there!”
Well known eBay seller Casey Parris (who also offers coaching and services) published the following video about the incident on his YouTube channel:
WOW, ebay never mention a word, didn’t see it on the threads either. Going to lose alot of buyers if they can’t trust ebay to get address correct.
Ah hah hah hah hah! Greatest. Tech. Company.
Having worked in Software Development, it sounds to me that eBays data may have been scrambled, and this happens quite often for many companies who use tech as their backbone. Sometimes these issues have to do with a mistake within the development process, or the problem can be a faulty hardware issue. And many times, this type of problem can take some time to figure out.