Thursday 12 July 2007

Play.com problem with sellers account

Gibraltar is within the UK according to Play.com. So sellers who are taking part in play.com's 3rd party seller program will only receive the standard price set for UK customers if orders are placed by Customers in Gibraltar, or any other UK dependency, such as the Falkland Islands for example. This even applies to playtraders who specify they will only dispatch to the UK.

The Playtrade system of inviting 3rd party sellers to market their goods and products on play.com is still pretty much in it's infancy. Play invited me to sell on their platform in March 2007, when they opened up the playtrader system to all. Previous to this they had only been allowing a very selected number of retailers to use their program, these sellers were the heavyweights of internet selling of media and dispatch thousands of items a month.

This problem reared it's ugly head after receiving an order from Play for dispatch to Gibraltar even though I had not offered international delivery as available for the item in question. The advice I at first received was very poor and indicated I would have to ship and bear the additional cost myself. After objecting to this and demanding to speak to a supervisor it was then looked into and admitted that this definitely needs the policy and technical team to look at, as a seller who had made available a heavier item for UK delivery had an order from a country which Play class as in the UK but Royal Mail class as international, the seller could make quite a loss by doing so, even if they had stated they were not dispatching items outside of the UK.

I will update this when I hear more back from Play.com in relation to this, meanwhile I am being left to discuss the matter with the customer and hope that they accept that play are to blame here and not myself. If the customer decides to leave me negative feedback as a result play have stated that they will not be able to intervene. As play customers are not used to leaving feedback in regard to transactions the level of feedback on play is very low, about 1 in 20 have left feedback so far, so negative feedback could have a very bad effect on my selling there.


I have had a limited success selling on Play up until now, and their system is fairly simple, though it is not easy to see who you are competing against from your listings page, only if there are sellers that have cheaper prices. To compare your listings you have to actually go to the play.com site and search for the item to find out who the other sellers are, their feedback and conditions/comments. Not ideal really, but it is hoped that they will develop this system to be more user friendly in time.

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