Ebay Bidding Rules - Changed?

I have had an ebay account for 23 years and aside from the occasional hiccup I have not encountered major issues. My account has always been registered in Canada and up until today, that has never been an issue. At issue has always been that not every Seller wants to sell to other countries. So if I wanted something listed on ebay.com I would log into that site and set my mailing address to my USA postal address. All has been good for 23 years.

Today every item that I tried to bid on ebay.com has come back with a message that I cannot bid because the Seller will only deliver to the USA. My ship to address is set to WA with the associated ZIP code, but it is ignored. Through an online chat I get informed that I either have to create a new ebay account with a US address or ask the seller to specifically add Canada as a destination country. According to ebay, bidding is based on the registration country, not the mailing address. I'm not sure when and why this was changed, but items that I could bid on last week, I can no longer bid on today. This seems like a silly change for both Buyers and Sellers.

Has anyone else encountered this recently?

This is most likely due to the Canadian government wants the taxes associated to the purchase of goods via ebay. As your ebay account is registered in Canada then any purchases have GST/HST applied to them.

That could very well be the case. However, if I buy something in the US, have it delivered to the US, pay US state taxes and then bring it into Canada it is up to me to declare it and up to the border agent to decide whether to collect taxes or not. To suddenly deny us to bid on or purchase items on ebay.com, Amazon.com, or any other online site seems excessive.

Perhaps this is a new ebay policy that came into effect after Christmas, but it sure limits the use of any site other than ebay.ca and its limited supply of certain material.

Sorry I can be of help to your situation, but I'm from the states and I had this happen to me today.
I tried to make an offer on ebay and it said the seller doesn't ship to my state. I then put up a new tab of the auction on my browser and tried again and it went through fine.

I have a feeling that someone at ebay.com made some form of software change that caused a glitch. About an hour after my online chat with ebay I could once again place bids without creating a US account or contacting the Sellers. Perhaps it is a sign of things to come.

It's typical ebay implementation methodology: roll it out to the public and THEN test it.

I agree that ebay and other companies 'lets users test their software' but allow me to offer additional context.

In my opinion and from what I can tell, ebay test methodologies are as comprehensive as any other billion dollar+ multinational company like Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon. Here are a few articles which touch on some of how they test.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/05/...g-evolution/
https://thenewstack.io/ebay-explore...ation-level/
https://innovation.ebayinc.com/tech...on-upgrades/
https://innovation.ebayinc.com/tech...-automation/

Of course the huge caveat is that no company, regardless of their size, can ever conceivably test software across the billions of customized computers that exist in the world. Once a computer, tablet, or phone begins to be used, users start customizing their devices. No company would even try to test these billions of unique configurations so instead they test on virgin installs of the various operating system platforms and the major revisions. Add in the various different browsers that also needed to be tested and the number of testing combinations number into the thousands.

If you could reach out to the testing group and describe a issue, they would not even try to emulate your particular and unique combination of device, operating system, operating system version, security patches, browser type and browser version. Instead, they would try to emulate the reported issue on a fresh operating system and browser install on a similar device. If they cannot emulate the issue on these virgin testing devices, they typically will just record the issue and add it to their database. If enough people report the issue across numerous configurations, they will reopen the discovery and do further testing.

It should be understood that no company releases revised software without extensive, and very costly, reiterative testing. The risk to shareholders and their stock prices (which are the things that these companies care the most about) would be monumental if they released untested software.
Don

That may be true for the majority of companies, but over the last 25 years I've seen enough half-baked or dain bramaged "improvements" pushed public from ebay, that subsequently need to be either pulled back or refined, that IMO their QA process is not as strict as it should be.

This is my experience as buyer, seller, and affiliate on the platform. There have been many occurrences where functionality just plain breaks, and it's not just isolated combinations of hardware/OS/browser, but fundamental removals or modifications of features. There are UI changes where you can just tell that these are developer/engineer-driven without any user hands-on, as any focus- or testing-group feedback would have killed them or changed them dramatically in short order long before making it to the public.

Hi Dan,
If you owned $50,000 of ebay stock, would you be ok (or make sense) that they have poor Quality Control/Quality Assurance in place for their software development? Of course not and you would take your investment somewhere else.

Keep in mind that a single software bug can easily put at risk millions of dollars in revenue.

Additionally QA department people are looking to advance their careers as much as anyone else, catching a software group doing lame things would mean bonus money and career advancement for the QA people. And for others like coders and software managers, doing something like released un-tested or poorly tested software out the door would not only mean loss of their jobs but also make them almost impossible to get another similar job. In other words, ebay has just as many checks and balances in place as other companies.

I am not implying that companies do not release buggy software. It happens all the time, no company is immune from making mistakes. Testing is ungodly expensive and the pressure to release very strong by forces within many companies.

But I have often seen in this community opinions that make it sound like some coder somewhere makes changes, ebay releases it without testing, and just waits for the bug reports to come flowing in. In my opinion, that is crazy and would never, ever happen. I base my opinion on decades of experience with software testing and QA in technology companies.
Don

I guess I spoke too soon last night when I said I could once again bid on ebay.com. This morning I am back to the same blocking. I guess they are trying to block out of country bids based on the account registration address and not the ship to address as they have done for the last 20+ years. A real shame.

Don, We'll just have to agree to disagree. ebay has a track record of doing UI- and feature-based testing extremely poorly.

I participate heavily on the ebay community forums under a posting ID, and more frequently in the hidden affiliate-only forums, and you would be surprised at how poorly managed and run certain aspects of ebay actually are.

I have gotten the impression over the years that the ebay engineers designing and implementing various changes have never actually bought or sold anything on ebay. "I must propose a change to the system every quarter in order to keep my job." "Let's eliminate the wildcard character in searching." There was a good idea. Not.

John,
I think that corporate ebay decisions are based upon metrics that have very little to do with stamps or covers. Our hobby, and 'used' items in general, are probably not even on their radar.
Changing things like how search works were probably decisions based upon the corporate metrics which showed losses due to the listing reliance upon horrible titles and descriptions that ebay sellers are notorious for.
This change was also happening at the same time ebay wanted to force users into searching and filtering based upon their exiting categories via drop down boxes. ebay has been abundantly clear over the last decade that they want to be another Amazon.
I would also note that coders are largely peons in today's corporate world, a dime a dozen and often found on the bottom rungs of a tech company's ladder. You can hire scores of excellent coders for less than the current minimum wage in the USA out of other countries. Large amounts of out-sourced coding is indeed done using people who might not even know what company they are coding for, never mind what the ultimate fully compiled code might actually do. They are given a directive to write code that does XYZ and their code is then compiled together with code from dozens or hundreds of others. Significant decisions (which might impact functionality or user experience) are not made by coders, they are only doing what they are told to do.
It is like some person on the Ford assembly line, they have no voice in how they assemble a sub-component, how the sub-component works or doesn't work.

Dan,
I agree that we will have to disagree. In my opinion what is in the ebay forum tends to be whining based upon ebay being the big, bad, 800-pound gorilla. If the decisions that ebay management has made over the years were as bad as the ebay forums make out them out to be it fails to explain why WallStreet and investors have been just fine with how things have been going to years. <shrugs>
Don

Don, My buying and selling experience goes well beyond philately. So I'll leave the conversation at that.

Why is John showing a NEW SCF Member?

There are more long-standing members that have it. It looks like this is a default avatar, irrespective of how long you have been a member or how many posts you made.

Here is what was the idea behind this avatar.

https://goscf.com/t/84315

Even the best ideas may require some finetuning.