That's bad, but what happens when you click on "Download Report" to generate the data for your labels as detailed above? You see this:
Updated 28-NOV-2019. Please
scroll down for the latest news.
If you've ever sold more than
one or two items on ebay and subscribe to Seller Hub, or get
that feature 'free' with a shop subscription, you'll know that
it's very useful to select all the items in "Manage Orders
Awaiting Dispatch," and hit the "Download Report"
button. That immediately dumps a .csv file on your hard
drive, you can open it in Excel, cut the stack of orders into
another spreadsheet and then use a link to Word to print out
your forty or fifty address labels all in one go.
Cleverer people than I have probably figured out much better
ways to do it, but it's quick once it's set up, and it helps
avoid packing errors.
Or rather it did, up until
19:40 on 1st October 2019.
The "Manage Orders Awaiting
Dispatch" page had been upgraded! No, it has not.
It's been turned into a complete shambles. Maybe this
was one of those attempts at improved mobile usability.
Well thanks ebay, because now business users can't use it
properly at all. All of the customisability has been
removed, so now you see only what ebay thinks is relevant to
some monkey selling two things a week on their mobile
phone. Postage paid can not be shown in the list
view. Postcodes can not be shown, even the actual
postage rate required to send can't be shown. No.
Now you have to click on each individual item, scroll down the
options, click to view the details, click to copy the address,
paste it into a label print window, print it, click to go back
to the list, click this, click that... It takes about
three times longer than usual to process an item and is a
serious retrograde step back into amateurism.
That's bad, but what happens when you click on "Download
Report" to generate the data for your labels as detailed
above? You see this:
"Classic" File Management
Centre? You mean Useless File Management
Centre that can take hours and is only intended for occasional
use for big files? The one that looks like Web 1998 and
sends you an email when it's finally finished doing the job?
It even says at the bottom, "Note:
Downloads may take a day past your scheduled time to
become available."
I'm all for a bit of nostalgia
but good grief. Just look at this.
I wouldn't call that very
mobile friendly. All you need now is a scrolling banner
and "Best Viewed in 800x600." (That's a 20th century
joke, kids.)
"We're working on an improved
solution for downloading orders."
What you actually mean is that
you couldn't be bothered to finish this dubious page upgrade
before you made it live, in order to meet a deadline and get
your management bonus. It's like Soviet Russia.
Anyway, let's join the fray
once more and see what the ebay seller support line has to say
about it.
Summary: I'm not
really sure what the summary was at the end of this, other
than, "Tough. We do what we like, however bad it is for
our own business and regardless of how stupid it is." I
do get particularly annoyed during this call though, when the
lady operative suggests that it's my fault for not using the
perfectly good alternative.
Seemingly out of the blue, and
not necessarily directly connected with the telephone call, a
site message arrives from Ebay Customer Services.
-------ECS-01-OCT-2019-12:58
eBay Customer Service SR# 1-229464998726
Hello Henry Walmsley,
Warm greetings from eBay!
This is an email about the updates that has been happening to
our web site. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may
cause you. We have changes with our Seller Hub and if you have
some feedback and suggestions please let us know so that we
can escalate it to our specialist and we will make sure that
everything is running smoothly on your account.
Thank you for doing business with eBay!
Respectfully Yours,
eBay Customer Service
[THREAD ID: 1-229464998726]
-----------------
-------Henry-01-OCT-2019-21:58
The facility to download an 'items awaiting dispatch' report
has been removed. This is use daily by hundreds of thousands
of users to print labels. Directing me to a 1998 style email
download page is not acceptable. Put It Back The Way It Was,
and do not make random updates without ensuring that they are
actually ready.
--------------
-------ECS-02-OCT-2019-04:50
RE: eBay Customer Service SR# 1-229464998726
Hello Henry,
Thank you for your reply with regards to download 'items
awaiting dispatch' report.
Henry, I understand the importance of downloading the report
of 'awaiting dispatch items' and I would be happy to help you.
I would request you to please download the report from
eBay.com site. You will get the option of downloading the
report from seller hub .com site.
Below is the link for your
reference.
https://www.ebay.com/sh/ord
Our technical team is upgrading the seller hub so some of the features may not be accessible in eBay UK site so I would request you to please use eBay.com till then.
I appreciate your
understanding in this matter. Have a Great day!
Kind regards,
Harshad G.
eBay Customer Support.
[THREAD ID: 1-2XF02504]
----------------------------
-------Henry-02-OCT-2019-12:41
Unacceptable. I suggest that you refrain from updating
pages before they are ready for release. I also note
that the page can no longer be customised to show the
postage rate selected etc. Useless.
---------------------------
-------ECS-02-OCT-2019-05:54
RE: eBay Customer Service SR# 1-229464998726
Hello Henry,
Thank you for writing back to eBay customer support.
Henry, I appreciate your efforts for reporting to us about
this issue. I can indeed understand the impact this issue must
be having on your overall experience as you have been
associated with eBay since a long time. The changes that
we introduce are strategically times and gradually introduced
on every account. We want to offer the best and features for
our customers to take necessary actions.
This limits us to make any manual adjustments to offer the old
layout. We recommend you to use the 'Tell us what you think'
to share your feedback and suggestions. This will help us to
make the necessary changes in coming days. Why the
problem happened -Let me tell you pro actively that the
problem you’ve explained is declared as technical issue on
eBay after receiving similar reports from other members. Our
technical team is now looking into the issue on high priority.
We've already forwarded the details of the issue to the
technical department. Rest assured, technical team is
currently investigating on priority to determine the root
cause of issue and how to fix it. Regarding what we are
doing to fix it - I can assure you that when these situations
do arise we always work as quickly as possible to try and
solve the problems. This is very important to us, as we want
our community of users to enjoy the best possible trading
experience and use all of the features available on the site.
Our site development team is looking into it at the highest
priority as we don't want our members to get effected due to
the glitch.
Thank you once again for highlighting this to us and mostly
importantly we appreciate your patience and understanding in
the meantime. We promise to learn from this experience and be
a better eBay in future. This is a rare occurrence; I
though understand it is an inconvenience for our members and
thus, please consider our apologies for the inconvenience. I
appreciate your patience all throughout.
Kind regards,
Sejal P.
eBay Customer Support
[THREAD ID: 1-2XGIY8L4]
------------------------
(End of correspondence so
far. The timestamps are a bit confused due, I assume, to
different time zones)
What a pile of BS. It's not a glitch, it was completely
known about in advance as indicated by the pop-up error
message window on the UK site. Calling it a glitch is an
ebay lie. Using ebay.com does appear to work for
this download feature though. Some currency appears
correctly in GBP, but some does not. I'm clearly not
supposed to be using ebay.com, despite this official
advice. What other problems are going to crop up by
using ebay.com as a UK seller I can only guess at; The
possibilities are endless. Other vital data such as
sales graphs in seller hub don't show, so I'd have to swap
between sites. However, I'll try it. It might be
interesting to see what collapses, and to find out just how
bad this advice from Harshad G was.
On a final note and as mentioned elsewhere, Harshad G and Sejal
P: It
is unprofessional to hide behind a partial name in what
you consider to be official correspondence.
Update 28-NOV-2019
Thank goodness, the "download report" feature
was replaced after a week or so. All the rest of the
hilarious "seller hub" is still in its freshly ruined
<cough> oh, I mean Upgraded state,
though. You can't see the postage rate that the
customer has selected. You can't see the name of the
"send-to" address or postcode. No. It shows
the registered ebay users name, not where to send it,
making it impossible in many cases to match it to the
printed address label without viewing the sales record
individually. If you wanted to slow down your
toy-town website still further by making sellers double
their page demands ebay, you've just succeeded. Well
done web-monkeys, another winner! I hope your
manager got his bonus.
I note that they are still messing about with it
too. SKUs have disappeared from the "Manage orders
awaiting dispatch" view. This could be good or bad,
depending on what you liked, or if your SKUs were well
organised. (SKUs are your own specific codes or
names which uniquely identify a particular item) You
used to be able to choose, and it worked.
Other ebay related pages that you might like:
Why and How to close an ebay
account, and Why and How it is made deliberately
difficult.
Much proof is provided.
Does ebay
limit your sales? Yes.
Proof is provided by various simple
statistical analyses and plain numbers that even I can
understand.
Does ebay
expect you to accept complete website failure as
normal? Yes.
Proof is provided in a telephone call, and some details provided by two very helpful customers. You may 'win' Ten Pounds (Woooo!) if you spend enough time on the telephone.
General email address checked daily including spam
folders: 