Phil online

I bought something on eBay last month. Now that they’ve integrated PayPal, it’s even easier to pay for the item. So I did, by clicking the large, yellow “Pay now” button.

I got a confirmation email. Two weeks go by; no package.

So I went to send an email to the seller. I scanned the message for his email address. And I noticed something strange: the wrong zip code.

Down in the middle of the “Item Purchase” email, in small print, it had the details. One of them was “Ship-to zip code:”. This field had the zip code from my old apartment in California from five years ago! Under that, it said ” If ZIP code is incorrect, please notify the seller and [click here to] update for your future purchases.” So I clicked here (too late to notify the seller), and my address listed was actually correct. It showed two addresses, both linked from PayPal, and both correct. One was the “Primary shipping address” and the other was the “PayPal address“. (Both are from PayPal; I don’t know what the difference is supposed to be.)

When I dug into my eBay account a bit more, I found that eBay had my old address listed as my “Registration address“, and this is the address they presumably sent the seller (on my behalf) to have the item shipped. [Update: the seller actually got the right address. It appears that the only eBay bug so far is listing the wrong “ship-to zip code” in my notification email.]

Now, even if I had noticed some time ago that this address was still in eBay’s computers, the fact that it’s listed as my Registration address and not my Shipping address would make me think that, you know, maybe they would use the Shipping address to ship me things. Right? Don’t you think?

But it gets better. In the PayPal receipt that I was sent for this transaction I see my correct address, the one I have on file with PayPal. The seller received this email also, so he should have the right address.

But what did the seller actually see? Did he get a payment receipt email from PayPal with one address and an eBay email with a different one? Did eBay offer to print a shipping label for him with the wrong address? I don’t know, because he hasn’t replied to my emails yet. But clearly eBay has a big problem here, hiding just below the surface.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 at 12:44 pm and is filed under General, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.