A warning about using Multi-buy promotions for your listings

ballisticbrian

A warning about using Multi-buy promotions for your listings
I noticed purely by chance that an item sold as a single item but had the full 15% off as if the buyer had purchased 3 items.
On further investigation, this had happened twice before with the same item but not on other items as far as I could see. It appears that when someone legitimately got the discount on your item, something in the database got stuck there.
After checking everything, and double checking the settings that are set per item when you make a listing and the settings on the promotions page, I called up eBay for an explanation.

In short, they were unable to give one and have failed to call me back in 2 weeks.
If you are interested in how the conversation went with their far east call center, the young lady put me on hold 5 times saying "let me just check my resources", and then finally came back on the phone and said, "so what it appears to be sir, is that the customer was able to make the purchase with the full 15% discount even though they only purchased one item." And then there was silence. And I was like, "well yes, you've investigated fully and managed to repeat back to me exactly what my problem is, but not any answer at all", and then she proceeded to do this a second time and gave the extra reassuring words that it had just given the customer (insert cute voice here) "an extra LITTLE discount."

If you've a medium sized enterprise (or any size really) and are giving away extra cute little discounts you don't know about, beware!

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

Out of interest did the orders show "Sold with Up to 15% off with Multi-buy promotion" in the Orders overview in seller hub? 

ballisticbrian

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head said:

Out of interest did the orders show "Sold with Up to 15% off with Multi-buy promotion" in the Orders overview in seller hub? 

Yes it did indeed, which is what makes it easy to spot and how I spotted it.

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

ballisticbrian said:

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head said:

Out of interest did the orders show "Sold with Up to 15% off with Multi-buy promotion" in the Orders overview in seller hub? 

Yes it did indeed, which is what makes it easy to spot and how I spotted it.

Cheers, will check ours this evening! 

forgotmyname

Think they have a few bugs recently. Found a seller with an item that appeared slightly cheap, fairly new seller
so thought selling at cost to get their feedback up. 

Tried adding 5 to my basket but that failed, added one and that worked add another and it gave a message along the lines
of you have bought more items from this seller that exceeds their limit.  Seems they only allowed one item per customer.

OK no problem, backs up my idea of them wanting feedback, but adding a 2nd item from another seller and then adding this
item from a different page gave the same message but actually allowed more than 1 in the basket. Repeated that and
finally managed to add 30 of that same item from that seller.  I didn't attempt the purchase, bought a better quality item
from a main UK company in a bulk box for only a little extra but fast delivery.

Should not have allowed me to add the items to the basket though.

soolin

forgotmyname said:

Think they have a few bugs recently. Found a seller with an item that appeared slightly cheap, fairly new seller
so thought selling at cost to get their feedback up. 

Tried adding 5 to my basket but that failed, added one and that worked add another and it gave a message along the lines
of you have bought more items from this seller that exceeds their limit.  Seems they only allowed one item per customer.

OK no problem, backs up my idea of them wanting feedback, but adding a 2nd item from another seller and then adding this
item from a different page gave the same message but actually allowed more than 1 in the basket. Repeated that and
finally managed to add 30 of that same item from that seller.  I didn't attempt the purchase, bought a better quality item
from a main UK company in a bulk box for only a little extra but fast delivery.

Should not have allowed me to add the items to the basket though.

You probably couldn’t have checked out , it’s possible to add things to a basket and not actually be eligible to check out and pay as the transaction isn’t live until you go to pay.