So, on Sunday, I wrote about this alarming bug with the new eBay Shipping Policies. To summarize, the policy maker seems to be defaulting to at least two different weights when you either create a new policy or edit an active one and it all adds up to this: You can’t create any new shipping policies or edit any existing ones that use First Class (domestic or international) or any international flat rate option. (So, you know, some of the most common options there are. Awesome.)

eBay only JUST got back to me about this late yesterday and still haven’t given me more than a “we’re looking into it” kind of answer. I don’t blame the CS reps, they’re just doing what they’re told, but the fact that they are taking this long to not just fix this but acknowledge it at all reflects very poorly on them as this is a massive issue for anyone trying to put up new listings. Limiting what shipping options you can offer on a listing is one thing but basically holding your active listings hostage and preventing you from editing them is a much bigger issue as far as I’m concerned. Especially since I’m not convinced it won’t cause issues for buyers during checkout.

Isn’t this just typical eBay, though? The reason more people aren’t talking about this is because most didn’t upgrade to the new policy system yet because they don’t trust new stuff from eBay. Why don’t most of us trust new stuff from eBay? Because of stuff like this exactly. You opt in their new program and they completely betray your trust but giving you something buggy and not addressing bugs and issues in a timely fashion, screwing up your sales.

But, as I mentioned in the original post, I thought I’d found a workaround. I took a live listing with similar shipping options and was able to apply that policy to my new listings.  Whew, right?

Yeah. No.

I couldn’t start my listings because of a Get It Fast error.

See, my live listing was a fixed price item and my new listings were auctions. I could see someone who’d never actually used eBay thinking of this as a feature (read that as, most of the people in charge of decisions about the site) but, to me, it’s a bug. Apparently, policies are meant to be for auction listings or fixed price and cannot be shared between them. This is because Get It Fast is tied to the policy. If you check this option off in the policy you can only use that policy for a fixed price listing or an item with Buy It Now. If you try to apply a policy where Get it Fast is an option to an auction without a BIN price, you’ll get an error and it won’t let you list your item. (For example: You wouldn’t be able to move a Fixed Price item to Auction without applying a whole new shipping profile that would be the same as the original in every single way except for that one little check box. You can’t just edit the active policy because that would effect all your other listings too. So moving something to auction is no longer one click, you’ll need to write a whole new policy every time just to eliminate one option just to switch formats. That’s how dumb this is.)

But back to my listings that I can’t upload. Remove Get It Fast from the profile, you say? I’d love to. Except that I can’t create a new policy or edit the existing policy because of the previously mentioned bug so there is literally no way to do that unless I had a recent auction I could reuse a Get It Fast-less policy from (which I don’t). I also can’t move any of my fixed price items to auction unless I add BIN prices because I get the same error. The only way I was able to get my listings up was to add a Buy It Now price to each of them.

(Theory: This whole thing is a conspiracy to force us to add BIN prices to our auctions so that eBay makes some extra coin from those fees.)

The logical thing would be for Get It Fast to be an option separate from shipping policies or, better yet, if the policies were just smart enough to only apply Get It Fast to items with a BIN price and ignore them for auctions but, as they work now, you’re going to be forced to duplicate every single policy you create with a version for BIN and a version for auction which is not only stupid, it really reduces the value of this policies feature.

What’s the lesson here? Shipping policies are even more busted than I originally thought. I’m not even doing anything all that complex, I can’t even imagine what other bugs there are that I haven’t managed to trigger yet.

Is eBay aware of these issues? Working on it? So far, all I’ve heard are crickets…

Please share any issues you’re having with this below and hopefully they’ll respond soon.

(Sorry no screenshots  this time, it was so late by the time I got my listings up, I just went right to bed.)

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