For those of you who have ever had a beef with ebay about how the site operates, you probably already know that contacting them asking for a change is usually a waste of time.

Well, I tried today, and while the person who I reached after trying to figure out the automated answer system (another pain in the you know what - in fact, actually trying to get a phone number as well as a case number is not that easy either - but that is another story), could not change was I wanted (I knew that in advance) but they did forward it up the chain to the programming people and in under five (5) minutes not only did I get both a phone call as well as an email indicating that they DID in fact make the changed request!

Back story. I recently returned from a month long trip to New Zealand and Australia and while gone I did not list any items because I knew that I would not be able to ship them.

When I did get back and started to list items, there was an offer of 100 free listings over a 3 day period, which I took full advantage of. Most, but not all items I only list as being shipped to the USA as I usually know in advance what the cost of shipping fees are, but I do ship a few items that will ship as First Class Postage overseas as the cost regardless of location is $1.15.

In the past, if you wanted to ship an item overseas, you needed to CHECK the box for international shipping and then proceed through various other options to do so.

Before contacting ebay, I had a request from a seller for my postage fees for an item that I had NOT went through the process of listing for overseas sells. This got me to wonder what the heck was up!

While I was gone, ebay changed the option for Overseas Shipping so that the DEFAULT was now ALWAYS checked, and if you did NOT want to offer overseas shipping, you had to UNCHECK this option. Not only did I have to go through nearly 100 listings to change this (you can NOT make changes to listings that all ready have a bid), but this new requirement seemed to be overkill to have to do the same for any NEW listings.

So I made the call, and for my account at least, the in fact CHANGED the default to be unchecked!

So, if you DO have a problem, even if you think they either do not care or will NOT make the change, make the call anyway, and maybe, just maybe, the WILL make the change.

Me be one happy camper. Today at least. Tomorrow no doubt, I will have another beef with ebay, but I will wait until then!

John K. Kallman
LM112-112

John