I won’t reveal any personal info about the buyer or the transaction except for general things, and I’ll keep things as simple as possible. The point is to make people aware of this possible bug.
I had a U.S. buyer purchase something. Three days after it shipped (before it was delivered), they sent me a message that I interpreted as buyer’s remorse.
We all know how costly and complicated international returns are, so as a formality I blocked the buyer from making additional purchases.
A few days later, when their item arrived, they opened a request with photos showing that it was damaged in shipping. Since this was an international return, I selected the option to make other arrangements. After consulting with an eBay CSR, I messaged the buyer to ask for both a shipping quote and their PayPal information so I could send them the funds for the label.
- From my end, it looked like they never responded.
- I didn’t receive any messages from the buyer in my inbox. (I later learned they sent 12)
- I didn’t receive any notifications of messages in the INAD request.
- The request was escalated by the buyer to a case today, so I followed up with eBay.
That’s when I learned from eBay that the buyer had actually sent me 12 messages. I sent screenshots of both the request and my inbox to show that nothing was displaying. I also checked my buyer management section on both .ca and .com to confirm the option to prevent buyers from contacting me wasn’t checked.
If you’re not familiar with how blocked messages work, the messages still appear to the buyer as if they were sent, and eBay CSRs can see them. They just don’t show up anywhere that the seller can see.
I removed the buyer from my blocked list entirely and was then able to receive messages from them. I squared up the return and resolved that part of things. eBay did tell the buyer I had blocked them. While I stand by my reasoning for originally doing so, I’d prefer they didn’t reveal that to buyers since it can be contentious to find out you’ve been added to a seller’s do-not-sell list.
I’m not sure if this was a one-time bug or if a recent update to the website means that blocked buyers can’t contact you at all. If you have an active transaction, it’s something you might want to keep in mind.
Hopefully this saves someone else from going through the same headache my buyer and I did, where they sent 12 messages that never showed up on my end, and I had to spend over an hour with eBay support sorting it out.
So yeah, whether it was a bug or a new policy, blocking buyers might now mean their messages don’t go through.
