posted on December 3, 2010 09:36:24 AM
I sent an item to ebay. The item has in the ebay info a 7 day auction without anything in the Buy it Now/Fixed price field. When I sent it to ebay, I did not change anything in the send to ebay screen.
The auction on ebay has a BIN price of $50 specified.
The SKU is Vendio - 1290268752195 and the Ad name is "Auction special". I have not changed anything in the item or the ebay listing since I listed it.
Some more background: I had previously listed this item as an auction with a BIN of $50. I edited the item and changed the starting price, removed the BIN and changed the shipping.
Even though I submitted this as a new listing from Vendio, when I look at my unsold items on ebay, the previous listing shows as having been relisted. I have seen that happen before when I send an item that I have listed before to ebay, but I've never noticed that the new listing was incorrect in any way. I don't know whether it is Vendio or ebay doing something that makes it show up as relisted, but I am guessing that it may be related to this problem.
This is an old eBay API bug that must have come back from the grave (great timing eh?)
We send the new value of 0 as the BIN field, but (what happened last time anyway) eBay just defaults to the last 'known' BIN value when the item is considered to be a true relist (where you would qualify for relisting credit, and when you get that link from the last item to the new one as you mentioned.)
We'll check into it to be sure something didn't happen at this end, but it's been just an eBay API hiccup the last two times it's come up and will likely require a fix from that end.
posted on December 3, 2010 10:30:05 AM
I figured it was something like that. This is a problem that will cost people money since ebay has been doing promotions where BIN is free, so people will be adding BIN during the promotion and removing it when there is no promotion, which is what I did.
Will Vendio report this problem to ebay?
Do you know if people in the past were able to get credit from ebay for the BIN fee that they were charged?
So, it is ebay that determines when a submitted listing qualifies as relisted. Do you know of any workarounds that we can do in our listing that will make it so ebay does not see it as relisted so we can avoid the problem?
If we find that the issue is again on the eBay side, yes, we'll report it to their dev forum - if it isn't already on the books (it usually is already identified but not fixed when we check these things there.)
I don't know of anyone specifically that requested a refund from eBay for an issue only reported in their developer forum, but the last time it came up there wasn't any promotions that were triggering the action - it was just a case where someone wanted to remove the BIN and it didn't happen as expected.
As for avoiding the issue while it's being checked into - is to make a copy of the item (or make a second ad) and submit it instead, so it's completely disconnected from any previous item.
posted on December 3, 2010 11:08:36 AM
Thanks. I'd appreciate it if you can let us know here if this is clearly identified as an ebay issue and let us know if there is an ebay bug number or a case number that can be referenced if we have to call ebay to try to get a refund. I know that if I call ebay, the first thing they will do is point the finger at Vendio. I've had them do that before even with problems that were clearly ebay problems.
Also if you could let us know if and when this is reported as fixed, that would be great.
posted on December 14, 2010 09:47:43 AM
Any more info on this? Has it been confirmed as an ebay issue? Been fixed yet? Another free BIN listing promotion just ended, so this will be a real problem and/or cost us real money again.
Right now there isn't a fix in place unfortunately, though we have made some traction in identifying some possible fixes that we can use to avoid this in the future.
As it stands this moment though, submitting a copy (or new ad/variation) is the only way to disconnect it from the previous ad.
As a reminder, this is only when you remove the BIN price and the previous occurrence of this ad did NOT sell.
