Excellent summary and a detailed action plan that goes beyond what Mayor George has done so far. Rodriguez-Carbone is a candidate for the US House of Representatives, running for the District 7 seat.
https://whispercampaign.substack.com/p/if-i-were-mayor-of-lakewood-this
I have 19 of something to sell.
I'd prefer they all go in one sale but I'm willing to sell individually.
I wanted to set a discount for buying multiple items, but the way Ebay allows this is stupid. You can set a discount for selling "2, 3, and 4+".
I'd like to set discounts at 3 and 5 units. A discount for 2 just doesn't help.
Why don't they let me have control and flexibility as a seller to set up the deals as I would like them?
I'm the buyer. I'm in the United States.
Bought an item from a seller in Italy.
Item was shipped UPS International Economy.
Tracking says item is held in customs, due to government requiring additional information needed from "customer".
I contact UPS, ask them who the "customer" is: sender or recipient? And what information do they need?
UPS tells me the "commercial invoice" was missing from the package, sender needs to provide it. UPS provides me a blank copy of the Commercial Invoice form and an instructional document. I can't fill it out, I don't know most of the information the seller should have provided. But the form requires both the sender and recipient to provide their tax identification numbers. Sender wouldn't have any way to know my SSN, and I should never have to provide my SSN to a foreign merchant.
I send the form to the seller and explain why they need to fill it out and send it to UPS, and how to do so.
Seller replies that they have sent the invoice to UPS and they sent a copy to me. The invoice they sent looks like a regular business invoice, but it's not the form UPS provided to me and it does not include all the same fields that UPS's form had. So I don't know if this form is going to be sufficient for the package to clear customs or not.
To cover my bases I send the copy the seller sent me to UPS at the email address for their international service. An hour later I call their international service 800 number and ask them to confirm receipt of the email and to confirm whether the invoice provided by the seller is sufficient, or if I need to go back to the seller and insist they fill out the form that UPS provided me. UPS International says they can't confirm receipt of the email for 24-48 hrs, but will reply when they have "processed" the email, and then next steps will happen as appropriate.
Which, I gather, the possible outcomes will be:
* release from customs
* I'll be billed for taxes owed, then the package will be released from customs
* the invoice provided by the seller won't be sufficient and the package will remain held by customs pending receipt of the correct, complete commercial invoice form in the specific format provided to me by UPS.
If it's the last of those, I'd prefer to go back to the seller now rather than wait 48 hours for the news from UPS that that's what I need to do.
So does anyone here have a good enough understanding of the customs clearance process to be able to advise whether I'm going to need to go back to the seller for the correct form to be filled out?
When I need to talk to eBay customer service, I vastly prefer to do so via live chat. Lately when I've needed to reach out to them, it's been very difficult to get the eBay chatbot to offer me this option.
I've been an eBay user since 1998, so pretty much nearly from the beginning, and I've seen it all. Mostly as a buyer, but I do sell a little.
I remember about 15-20 years ago how it was next to impossible to call eBay for support. They didn't have adequate staffing in their call centers, and you'd have to hold for 20-40 minutes to talk to a human. At some point, they fixed that problem, but with overseas call centers. Between the poor audio quality due to the long distance and compression, the non-native english speaking in an accent that is difficult for me to understand, and the scripted responses, I found it very difficult to have confidence in the outcome of a call. And then when you do talk to someone, you don't have a transcript, so there's always a risk that you're told the wrong thing and have no proof of it, and they deny it later, etc.
So for all those reasons I vastly prefer live chat, and it's the only way I'll reach out to Ebay anymore. But they don't want to offer the option anymore.
I've found that the only way I can get the chat bot to offer the option to me anymore is to repeatedly tell them I am hearing impaired and have special needs for accessibility.
Ebay should be offering this to everyone, but especially for someone who has a disability, they should only have to state that once. And it should be a setting in their profile, not something you need to specify each and every time you attempt to make contact.
The last time I chatted with customer service, this morning, I had to ask the bot at least a half dozen times, before it finally offered me the option to go to live chat with a human. And yes, I had to say "I am hearing impaired" "I am disabled" "I cannot use a phone" a good 5-6 times before it finally presented the option to me.
I'm not fully deaf, but I do have tinnitus, and really have a hard time understanding speech over a typical overseas phone line because of signal issues.
Accessibility is a serious issue for everyone. Most people will be disabled in some way at some point in their lives. Ebay should do better at providing accessible options to its customers. We should only have to ask once.