Ebay Is Generating Automatic Country Exclusions!

A buyer from Cyprus contacted me recently because he was unable to complete his purchase. He could 'buy' the item, but the system would not allow him to make the payment. It turned out that this was because I had 'excluded' Cyprus from the list of countries I ship to.

I have never excluded Cyprus, however. At the moment, I have no excluded countries on any of my listings. So I contacted an ebay Customer Service support person yesterday and she looked into it. She discovered that ebay is automatically generating an exclusions list and adding it to my listings, even though I cannot see it and have not been informed that this is happening.

About 50 countries are 'excluded,' mostly small territories like Nauru but also some major ones like Norway. These exclusions are invisible, in other words, they do not appear when I list or relist or revise an item.

I am currently waiting for an explanation from ebay, but I thought I'd let other ebay sellers know about this, as it could be happening to them too.

Nothing ebay does surprises me anymore!

If you do get a reply it may well be read from a script that suits them.

It seems they did not want anyone to know this was happening, otherwise it would not have been made invisible.

That sucks but it is their sandbox. Not many options for sellers and they know it.

I just checked and I can ship to both Cyprus and Norway so the policy can't be across the board for everyone.

She told me that this issue seems to affect a lot of Australian sellers, so it could just be sellers located in Australia.

That said, to discover the issue for yourself someone in one of the excluded countries would have to buy your item from you for you to find out that you're affected

The exclusions list is invisible, so you wouldn't know that there's a problem unless the buyer contacts you to let you know that they are not being allowed to complete the transaction. Most people in one of those countries would just give up.

My listings show that I can ship anywhere in the world, but in practice I cannot.

One of the biggest stamp sellers on ebay (pavstamps) contains following in big red font on top of every listing: "NOTE: We ship to most countries of the world, disregard exclude list, contact me if any questions", may explain why.

It would make no difference if I were to write this. The system is preventing the buyer from paying for his item. He just gets a message saying in essence,'This seller does not ship to your location.'

based upon this thread, I took at a look at my ebay shipping exclusions. I distinctly recall setting these up a few (3?) years ago after getting a couple of 'not received'.

I was surprised to see that in my account config it shows this


Yet in my listings it shows this


The listing shows some of what I remember I setting up about 3 years ago.

Odd, but leads me to think that there is an configuration that the listing server is using but that the current account config page is not looking at.
Don

Edit: Wait, I think I see what it is doing...When I go to list a new item, if I select 'US locations' it automatically generates the exclusion list shown above.

So it appears that the listing page overrides the account setting. I assume that the account config is viewed as a default but that you can override those defaults on a listing by listing basis.

Don, at least you recall creating that list. I had nothing to do with mine!

Also, the exclusions list does not appear on my listings - it only appears after the item has sold!

Why would ebay put up impediments to selling?

Perhaps chargeback and fraud issues since they are the payment processor in many if not all cases?

OK, I just did some quick research and ebay's excluded list appears to be tied to USPS International Service disruption lists and bulletins.

That's interesting, rogdcam.

But, if so, you'd think they'd tell buyers located in the affected countries what's going on.

And you wouldn't think that they'd keep sellers in the dark about it either.

Even the ebay Customer Service person had no what was going on.

I agree that this is a snotty way for them to do business. I agree - bring the sellers into the loop.

Perhaps they figure that the predicament that you find yourself in is so rare that they are willing to absorb the bad karma in those few instances, rather than send out an honest, yet alarming, notice to every seller. This way, they are only ticking off a few sellers. Perhaps they feel it is easier to simply prevent sales between countries with poor or delayed mail service rather than have to deal with angry buyers that are not getting their purchases in a timely fashion. Still, whatever the reasoning, the way they went about it just sucks. But then, why should we be surprised? It's ebay.

Here's the list of current USPS mail suspensions;




When I was notified of the suspension for Australia I was concerned because I have several good customers there. I found that I was able to sell and ship to Australia without a problem using " ebay International Standard Delivery" which is a new service and much cheaper than their Global Shipping program.