Lesson 2: HELP!

HELP

If you run into a snag on eBay, there are lots of places to go for help. Some venues are more effective than others. eBay's Live Help has, over time, earned the nickname of Live Helpless. I found the customer service reps I have talked to are clueless, but extremely friendly and overly polite.

I have found that the Answer Center provides prompt and accurate answers to just about every question asked. Questions are answered by eBay buyers and sellers who volunteer their time, not eBay employees.

The first thing to do when you run into a problem is to check eBay's Help section. The Help link is top, right of just about every page. There is an A to Z index as well as a search box.

A couple of weeks ago I had a customer purchase 81 different items from my eBay store. When I went to send a combined invoice, the system would not let me. It would only let me send an invoice for 40 items at a time. My first instinct was to go to the Answer Center, but I remembered reading on more than one occasion that people in the Answer Centers prefer you to try to get the answers on your own first so I went to the Help section, typed in the search box 'invoicing' and found nothing of use. I typed 'invoicing' in the Answer Center search box and found nothing of use. As a Power Seller, I can call eBay. Well, sort of. I go through their system jumping through their hoops, then someone calls me.

So, I get the call. A very pleasant person asks how they can help. I tell them that I need to send a combined invoice for 81 items, but the system is only allowing me to invoice 40 at a time. I am asked if I would mind being put on hold while she researches the situation. 8 minutes later she comes on line and says "That's a lot of stuff. You can only invoice 40 at a time. When you send an invoice for the first 40, the system will let you send a second invoice to the same customer for another 40, and so on." Hmmm...didn't I tell her that was the problem? I wanted to send only 1 invoice, not 3. I told her that if I did it that way I would have to pay 3 transaction fees when my customer paid through PayPal and I would have to send 3 separate international priority flat rate envelopes at nearly $13 each in order for the transaction to be protected by PayPal. So, the situation would cost me $26.60 more than it should (2 extra PayPal transaction fees of $.30 and 2 extra Priority Internation flat rate envelopes). The very sweet and 'helpful' eBay customer service representative said that perhaps I should check with PayPal. Perhaps they had a way to send an invoice for all the items. She graciously transferred our phone call to PayPal where I talked to another extremely polite lady that really couldn't help either except to tell me that I could send more than one eBay transaction in the same package and still be protected by PayPal in case something went wrong (the package was lost by the post office, etc). Okay, so I would only be out $ .60 for the two extra PayPal transactions. I could live with that.

I was on the phone for nearly 45 minutes between the eBay rep and the PayPal rep. If I could have gone straight to the Answer Center, would I have saved myself 45 minutes? I just posed the question in the Answer Center...let's see what they come up with.