WebInterpret WARNING

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Hey Ya’ll!

The most recent ebay promotion to use this until the end of the year free had me try them out. If you click the link you are automatically signed up from your email(which seems crazy)

Basically if you have an item for sale on ebay.com, webinterpret will also list the same item on up to 6 additional ebay sites for free. They will do this until you have reached their free cap. For me this was 5000 listings. I was on the phone for a hour or so yesterday with a rep making sure everything checked out. Less than 24 hours later, I already have a headache on my hands.

WebInterpret got to work fast and duplicated my listing for Germany and Australia. That capped me out with roughly 2500 listings on both.

The BIG Problem:

Quantity does NOT update. If you have a single item for sale, once the listings are duplicated across the other sites they should update across the board if an item sales. This is not the case. I only had 1 left of a certain item and it sold on Germany’s ebay site, but then a few hours later also sold on the US site, and was still for sale on the Australian site. When I called ebay, they just re-directed the issue to webinterpret who would then contact ebay, and then they would contact me back… all the meanwhile my inventory gets messed up. How ebay could partner with a site that is bugged at its core is beyond me. The rep even told me that if anyone asks, he tells them NOT to use webinterpret.

There are also some other issues like no combined shipping available and selling limits, but those do not compare to overselling and screwing up inventory on every single item sold through them.

I just wanted to post this as a warning for anyone else who got the promotion or has looked into using them. I am now waiting to hear back from customer care on my account deletion. I was able to turn off listings for 5 of the countries which allowed for the ones they duplicated to end, but they will not allow me to do all 6 unless my account is shut down… I just hope that listings are not auto duplicated now into the last country I cannot shutdown.

This could have been a sweet deal if it was working

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Hmmmmm…now I have to get to work on a couple id’s that I implemented this service. Dang…why wouldn’t they tell us first???
Thanks for the heads up Rusty.

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"We wanted to remind you that this promotion is entirely free. There are neither eBay insertion fees, nor Webinterpret fees.

We automatically list your translated and localized items on eBay’s international site and synchronize stock across eBay’s sites. You will now see your translated listings in your sellers account as part of this process."

The stock is suppose to be synchronized, it just was not for me. If you make a sale and it shows up as a different currency I would just go ahead and check your other stock. For me this was too much to keep up with. If the system automatically sychronized after each sale, then it would have been something great to try.

I did also notice that as a seller you will now pay the conversion fee between currency, so “free” is not exactly true either. For example, on a sale for $5.99, I cleared $5.18 through paypal. So instead of ~$.57 pp fee, it was $.81 which can make a big difference in the long run or on a larger sale.