eBay Considering Banning Russian Users Because of Postal Service

We in Russia love reforms, I think – or at least we have learned to love them over the last 20 years when we have been constantly reorganizing all the remnants of the Soviet Union. But the problem is that everything that we have comes from the Soviet past and also happens to be so solid and rigid that reforms sometimes come and go without significant results.

This is true for many corporations with the management working as they learned to in the Soviet past but of course it is particularly true for all the government institutions and state-run companies that follow the procedures they’ve been following for the last few dozens of years – and don’t have any intention to change anything. Russian Post is one of such companies.

The Russian postal service has never been reliable (as far as I can remember it) and you should not be surprised about having to wait for letters for weeks in a row – instead you’d be surprised if you get a shipment from abroad in just two weeks (record time I’ve ever witnessed myself). I know how they work so I tend to send my Christmas cards some time in the early-mid December – and still some friends in the US report getting them only in February or even as late as in March.

But lately the situation with the Russian Post turned from a tolerable poor service into a complete disaster – that even has a chance of banning Russian users from those e-commerce and online auction websites where we are still allowed to buy things. Instead of the usual 2-3 weeks deliveries from abroad, the state-owned company can now make people wait for 6 weeks or longer – and you will be happy if your letters or packages are delivered at all instead of getting lost.

It all began from a reform that intended to improve operations of the postal service – and for a number of complicated reasons resulted in damaging them even further (even though many people used to think it could not get any worse). And while the management does not really bother with explanations to their customers (Russian citizens), international companies may take their own measures to protect their businesses from the Russian postal service.

Now the largest online auction site eBay is reportedly considering forbidding Russian users from participating in transactions quoting the increased delivery time (from 10 days to 2 months) as the reason. It is interesting that last year Russian users purchased $50 million worth of products on eBay so the country has become an important market for the online giant. It is no wonder that eBay is now launching a localized version in Russian – and while there are still plenty of obstacles for the local users (including PayPal limitations and many sellers being unwilling to deliver internationally), it is still obvious that eBay is more than willing to make a step towards the users in Russia.

But now another force comes into play that neither eBay, nor Russian users have enough resources to control – the Russian Post. Rumors are that due to the many complications eBay may simply prevent Russian users from buying anything not to face any problems with being unable to decide if the parties of every transaction fulfill their obligations or not.

Basically PayPal will refund the money for the goods that are never sent and if the seller can’t prove the item has been sent, the buyer has good chances of getting the refund and also receiving the item in a few months – absolutely for free now. Some users may do so unintentionally because after waiting for a few weeks they may decide the purchase will never arrive, and claim the purchase has never been sent. And of course this offers tons of opportunities to scammers who will want to buy things and get them for free eventually simply by claiming they were never sent (and hoping the postal service will still deliver them at some point).

This may have a whole range of negative consequences for the Russian users of eBay. First of all, it is obvious that those sellers who deal with such problems, will quickly exclude Russia from the list of countries they deliver to. On the other hand, PayPal may introduce further limitations for the users from Russia (which are already numerous enough anyway) like stop accepting new cards issued by Russian banks which will make PayPal totally useless for Russians.

I honestly hope such worst things won’t happen and the problems will not prevent eBay from still working with the growing market in Russia that they definitely consider important enough already. But unfortunately at the same time I can hardly imagine anything that PayPal can do about the situation with the postal service because no negotiations will help here and the only thing we could do is just hope that their reforms will finally be completed and will actually improve the level of service.

Via (in Russian)