Well, I had an
experience on eBay, this morning, which can only be described as
Kafkaesque. I had to cancel a sale
because global shipping rejected my customer’s address. Fine, I thought. When I tried to proceed, eBay gave me a
message that I needed to cancel from the French site, since that is where the
transaction originated. So, I went there
and dang! It’s all in French! I can’t read French! Oh, it gets better. I called eBay in the US and spoke to the
nicest lady (with a foreign accent) and she told me I had to go to the German
site. I protested and said I was pretty
sure I was supposed to go to the French site.
She insisted we visit the German site (ebay.de) together. And so we did. I logged in (either my computer or their site
was really S L O W) and finally navigated to mein eBay. Then, all of a sudden, the nice lady told me
she was wrong – and we were supposed to be on the French site, after all. So to ebay.fr and mon eBay we went. She instructed me to choose the first
option for cancelling a sale which was non-payment by the customer. That was not the reason for the cancellation,
I said. My customer made several
attempts to pay, but global shipping insisted that she didn’t have a physical
address. My customer does, indeed, have
a physical address. She’s had many
transactions and has 100% positive feedback (but I digress). I said we needed to choose an option that didn’t make
my customer look bad. The nice lady with
the foreign accent (who spoke neither German nor French) and I mutually agreed to
use the second to last option to cancel.
That, at least, had the word internationale
in it, so we guessed (and we were just guessing at this point) it might be
closer to the truth of what happened.
Anyway, my sale was cancelled, finally, but the whole ordeal was like a
nightmare! To her credit, the eBay
customer service rep (the nice lady) was a sweetheart and very patient. And we did actually do a lot of giggling! She was using foreign language dictionaries
to translate words. But I wonder why eBay
doesn’t have instant translation between the sites… That would have saved a lot of time and
trouble, today.
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1 comment:
Conni, that sounds like a nightmare! It is worse than dealing directly with international customers, as I have always had good sales that way. At present, I've decided not to ship internationally. I don't want the extra 'hassle' of printing out customs paperwork ~ which is nothing compared to your experience. I had been considering using eBay's new Global Shipping Program, but now I think I will hold off for a while. Who has the time to spend working out such problems when there is so much to do in a day? At least your eBay customer rep was pleasant to work with :)
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