Some sellers are getting upset about the renewal date of listings that eBay changed this month as part of its GTC mandate (Good Til Cancelled). The original poster on
this thread started yesterday believed that the date-changed on some listings meant eBay would be changing renewal dates frequently.
The seller wrote in part, "This morning, I notice several items that DID have 19 days left... now showing 2 hours and a few minutes left. Apparently, eBay's solution to the GTC/30 day debacle is to "adjust" ending times as they see fit, further adding to the confusion for sellers. I know where items are in my selling list... but with this new thing, eBay is going to constantly be "re-ordering" our selling list."
A reader pointed us to Sunday's thread and said they also believed eBay was overcharging sellers as a result of the renewal-date changes.
eBay announced the GTC Mandate in February, and it went into effect in March. In May it said it would change GTC renewal dates in July.
eBay confused the issue back when it first announced the GTC mandate, failing to anticipate that a 30-day auto-renewal period would not sync with monthly billing cycles and would therefore result in sellers paying listing fees twice in a month for some months.
A seller responding to yesterday's thread on the eBay discussion boards said what sellers were seeing this month was a one-time date change in response to the problem that the move to GTC caused, and to avoid sellers being billed for more than 12 renewals in a year:
"As eBay said in the announcement. They were going back to the ORIGINAL date the listing was posted to pull the posting date to use for future renewals. For those that have had certain GTC listings up for a long time, this will result in some odd date ranges on the renewals like you are seeing on some of yours. All of these are in FAVOR OF THE SELLER as you can see with yours. It is a one month bonus and next month it will settle into an even flow."
An eBay moderator confirmed that seller's response was correct and said, "The August renewal date is based off of the original date the item was listed on the site. August will be an odd month as far as renewal dates are concerned. Sorry for the confusion this has caused!"
In May, eBay had explained it would roll out a fix to the renewal-date issue in July, and it appears that's what is causing the sellers' consternation. There's no notice on the Announcement Board this month giving sellers a heads' up.
It's been a confusing rollout - let us know if it's going smoothly and if you have any questions about the date changes you may be seeing. Especially if you have concerns related to billing.