Historically things have been pretty rosy for me on eBay. Everything I’ve paid for is what the seller said it was and there were no issues. However, I’ve recently had to submit an auction dispute claim on an item that never turned up – fortunately it didn’t cost much and I paid by PayPal so I should get my money back. Anyway, an interesting thing came up when I initiated the process.

I live in the UK, as does the seller. eBay.co.uk is my local site and that’s what I browse to find new listings etc., so that’s where I submitted the dispute form. However, the next page informed me that I needed to submit the form on eBay.com because that’s where the item was sold – or rather, that’s the site where JBW submitted the winning bid. Now I don’t think that makes any difference to the process but it might cause some confusion somewhere down the line since the transaction looks like: buyer (UK) -> eBay.com (US) -> seller (UK). Since both the UK and the US speak English, eBay emailed communications should be readable by both parties. However, the same might not be true for transactions made in Germany or France say.

I hope that you don’t have to go through this process yourself but it’s something to bear in mind.

Hi,

I’m surprised, too, that I’ve to create a dispute on ebay.com, not on ebay.de. My JBidWatcher configuration ist set to ebay.de. Even the normal ebay mails are in german.

Greetings,
I responded in the bug, and I’ll put it here for future searching as well…

This is very unlikely to get fixed.

JBidwatcher has to parse the pages to get the information, and historically eBay has staged changes to the various other countries over large blocks of time, sometimes changing things on them first, sometimes last. In order to work, JBidwatcher needs a stable target to parse and use to submit bids.

In essence I believe that trying to use the individual country sites for more than a browse-to target (which is all it is right now) would increase the difficulty of making it work at all substantially.

For the vast majority of cases, there’s no part of the process that requires this, and I’m not willing to massively increase the complexity for the general case, ‘just in case’ there’s the rare dispute which has to be resolved on ebay.com.

I’ll think about putting something next to the ‘browse-to’ setting that emphasizes that it really is only a browse-to target and that auctions are loaded and bid on via ebay.com. I can’t think of a clean way to message that, right now, so it probably won’t happen soon…

I am sorry it was a surprising experience; I don’t understand why it’s ‘where the bid is placed’ either, but that’s eBay…

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!