More Stupidity from eBay Inc.

OK, I half-heartedly apologize for the title of this post, but only because I have a mish-mash of items to report from both the user-front of eBay and about eBay's actions, that really are probably best summed up by this title. Before I begin, I will say that in a company of eBay's size, there will always be problems, but that said, the "petty" preventable problems need to be addressed correctly in order to protect not only individual users (who need many times to be more responsible) but more importantly the reputation of the institution. With a billion or so dollars just sitting around in eBay's piggy bank, there are sometimes no excuses that can be made for the type of, uh, stupidity that you are about to read about.

More eBay Sanctioned Censorship:
"It's eBay's site, they can do as they see fit." I've seen that line posted so much by eBay huggers over the past few years that I've grown numb and no longer even argue on the eBay forums when I hear it. I've reported before about eBay seeing fit to censor things that are not really policy violations, and even molding their policy to give them broad ranging censorship power over their users. The story I want to relay today deals with the Trust & Safety discussion board thread, help with frau?!!!!!!!!! You can read the whole thing in about five minutes if you want, it isn't long, and it surely won't get any longer - since eBay moderators have locked the thread, preventing any more posts. I give eBay kudos for not deleting the thread entirely, but locking a thread with valuable information about fraud is not only unproductive, but just plain stupid.

They original poster on that thread starts off by revealing that they really have no idea about how the Paypal Buyer Protection program works, and that they had bought an item but the same identical item was still up and running without a BIN price. It appears the listing had an immediate redirect to a website based in the Czech Republic to a page that mirrored the eBay listing page - complete with fake eBay sign-in page when the BIN button was clicked. Buyers need to learn about these, you can't always just blame eBay for this....that said, it can be very hard to spot, as you almost have to watch your address bar constantly. To make matters worse for the buyer (and in defense of the buyer's actions that lead to handing over their password), the buyer contacted eBay Live Help about the listing and the Buyer Protection Program. The Live Help rep looked at the auction and replied to the buyer's concern:

Should you need a refund for this transaction, the insured amount will be taken from the seller's purchase protection account and sent to you. The refund is sent to your bank account, or by check or money order. The way you are refunded is at your choice. You have 30 days from the purchase date to request a refund. Refund requests are processed within 3 days.

That post, as well as several others from the "rep" that was posted by the buyer on the eBay T&S forum shows one of two things....1) That eBay employee is completely devoid of any knowledge about eBay & Paypal Policy.....or.....2) The scammer set up a fake Live Help link and is actually using "Live Help" to talk buyers into "purchasing" fraudulent items. My guess is the former, as the chances that a buyer will click the three links necessary to get from a listing to Live Help is low, and the amount of programming it would require for such a low chance of use is probably not a very efficient way to run a scam......but who knows - so be careful. By the way, if you read the paragraph from the eBay Live Help rep above, and don't notice any problems, you NEED to read up on buyer protection.

In Defense of eBay:
I must note that the seller of the item discussed above was suspended. Although it took multiple referrals from T&S Board users, it got done. When trying to view that seller's other items, you get an error message from eBay: Feature Unavailable. We are unable to return search results because this seller's account has been suspended. We apologize for any inconvenience. eBay has seen fit to actually use the word "suspended" and remove all of the ads from these pages. There have been numerous critics of eBay for posting ads on these NARU alert pages and for the vague nature of the message.

Now let me suggest that eBay go even further and post a reason why the account was suspended along with a warning about completing transactions with the seller in question and also a request that anyone with information about the seller should contact eBay T&S team. It could say simply: Feature Unavailable. We are unable to return search results because this seller's account has been suspended because of alleged fraudulent activity. We suggest that you do not complete any transactions with the eBay user in question at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience and gladly accept tips and information about this seller and other instances of fraud on the site (and then give a link). Doesn't seem so difficult.

More Live Help Incompetence:
This one actually happened to me. I use Live Help from time to time, but have NEVER had a Live Help representative actually answer my question correctly or resolve the problem I'm having. A few weeks ago, I tried to list an antique Tiffany & Co. item. The listing would not go through TurboLister. I assumed that it was because I used the keyword Tiffany & Co., and recent listing restrictions on designer items have been put in place. I checked with Live Help to see if that was the case (because TL didn't identify the error). Here are the explanations Live Help gave me for error.
1. The first thing that needs to be done to ensure the listing will go through is that you link your PayPal account to your eBay account. Yeah, I'd already done that one and sold on the account in the past.
2. Second step to do is add a credit card on file and or get ID verified so that your account is set up to sell. Yep, done and done, weeks before.

I suggested that the error might have been due to a lawsuit against eBay by Tiffany & Co. The rep assured me that I just needed to put a CC on file or get ID verified, repeatedly, even though I kept telling him that I had done so a long time ago. I listed the item on a different account while I was chatting with him, and it uploaded fine. I then listed another item on the account in question while chatting with him, and it uploaded fine.

The Bottom 2%:
Think you have a good eBay business? Think you are a reliable seller who exhibits excellence in your selling practices? Do you have exemplary feedback? Think again! That's right, just because you have great feedback and happy customers doesn't mean you are a good seller, not according to eBay anymore. Some sellers have been reporting receiving emails from eBay and having their accounts shut down because they fall in the bottom 1 or 2% of eBay sellers. One such seller's story made the ABC news, story in this video. The video tells the story of a seller with 99.3% feedback that was NARU'd and had all her listings canceled because of what eBay says was ONE complaint. Yet eBayMotorsSucks.com routinely shows instances of fraudulent sellers who have been repeatedly reported for scam listings and no action is taken by eBay for days or weeks.

Threads are popping up all over the eBay Community Forums about this issue. Like this one seller who has a 99.5% feedback rating. The seller received this email from eBay:
eBay requires sellers to maintain minimum standards in buyer satisfaction. Our goal is to ensure that the marketplace is a safe and reputable place for our community to buy and sell.

When a seller lists an item and a buyer places a winning bid for that item, they have formed a contract. When a seller fails to fulfill the obligation in their contract, they are in violation of eBay’s Seller Non-Performance policy . If more than 5% of a seller’s buyers are dissatisfied, as measured by negative and neutral Feedback left or Item Not Received complaints, the seller is in violation of the Seller Non-Performance policy. It is important for you to understand the following information regarding your performance:

 Based upon inputs from the buyers over the past 90 days, your level of performance resulted in >5% buyer dissatisfaction. This account falls into the bottom 2% of all eBay sellers with regard to buyer satisfaction.

Ooopsie-Daisy:
Not only is eBay shutting down accounts in the bottom 2% of customer satisfaction, eBay has been reported to have shut down a number of sellers accounts for no reason whatsoever. eBay has called this a mistake and has reinstated the users' accounts and put their items back into their MyeBay (in the unsold section) where the seller then has to relist everything - which is sometimes thousands of items. eBay has reportedly compensated some of these sellers financially, a very good indication that eBay screwed up big time, but the compensation was very very low and did not even amount to a small fraction of the sales lost during the down-time....not to mention those lost while having to relist thousands of items.

Portions of the above article may make no sense, may have grave grammatical and sentence structure errors.....It's the weekend....sorry.

eBay Inc. Goes Back to China

eBay has once again put on the gloves and jumped back into the Chinese auction ring with the ebay.cn going live....again. Redline China reports that eBay's Chinese site will be mainly for use for business trade internationally. So get ready for even more Chinese items on eBay.com? Time will tell.

I don't have too much to say about this move, partly because dumb-ole-me can't read Chinese. However there are a few things that caught my eye on the site and one thing I must comment on. First, although much hype has been made of the eBay v. Google "battle" here in the US, eBay has put a good sized Google logo at the bottom of the eBay.cn homepage - with a link to Google.com. The link is almost as large as the eBay logo at the top of the page (all the logos for other companies at the bottom are this size too). It seems to me that eBay is playing the media and financial analysts with the whole "right hand don't know what left is doing" routine. It's sort of like dating someone that's unpopular, but only in private, while denying you even know the person to all your cool friends.

If you visit eBay China, you will also see scrolling ad banners on each side of the page. They follow you.... For the critics of all the banner ads on eBay.com, take note of how bad it could be and be thankful.

Finally, my thoughts. I admittedly don't know the details of the relaunch, as it seems they have not been released by eBay, but... eBay has already failed in China once. Now they are using Tom Online (which holds a 51% interest in the new site) to try to gain local acceptance. Critics of eBay management view this move as silly and one more time that eBay is neglecting the profit center (the US market) in favor of fanciful dreams of world domination that seem so far out of reach. Proponents of eBay's re-entry into China are giddy with anticipation of 1 billion+ Chinese using Skype. It seems that their hope in this will never succeed. Since the new site does not appear to be for everyman-China, but rather businesses who want to sell items and ship them outside of China, the pool of potential Skype users shrinks dramatically.

Meg Whitman also reports that there will be even greater fraud prevention measures in China. WTF? So does this mean that eBay Inc. has the means at their disposal to crack down harder on fraud and prevent more fraudulent listings from appearing on the US site, but is choosing not to use those methods - instead will use this technology and methodology on an unproven site in a region that has all but rejected eBay? ...all but rejected eBay, but for the millions of items every month listed from China on the US site that are fakes, forgeries, reproductions, knock-offs, etc.? There has been much criticism from both buyers and sellers in the US over the inclusion of Chinese based listings in the past, and that continues today.

If this effort fails, what then? Meg Whitman & Co. have shown mediocre results at best when it comes to acquisitions and decisions based outside of the US eBay.com site. Failure in China, failure in Japan, slow acceptance of the eBay brand in other Asian countries, and no real big winners as far as profit goes from their many acquisitions. How much money is eBay willing to throw in the well, hoping to get it right in China?

SS2BM Begins Today

What is SS2BM, you ask? It stands for Summer Solstice to Blue Moon, and it is a ten day celebration of independent eCommerce business owners and auction sites and their independence from eBay Inc., according to Pheebay.com, where the idea was conceived.

The promotion runs from June 21st through June 30th. So is there a sale or something? Yes, possibly. Each individual site owner that is taking part chooses their own promotions during the SS2BM. Quite a few independent etailers have signed up for the promo as well as a number of online auction sites. The goal of this campaign is to educate the online consumers that there is more to shopping on the internet than just going to eBay.com.

The days of the internet boom and sites like Pets.com has come and passed. Today there are very few large webstores that are household names, so many times buyers turn to the only remnants of that boom for their shopping needs - mainly eBay and Amazon. While both are good sites that offer plenty of selection it is important to realize that there are hundreds of millions of products on the web that appear on independent web stores and smaller auction sites - many times the number listed on eBay at any given time.

To do a quick all-inclusive search of those stores and auction sites that have signed up for SS2BM, simply use the custom Google search bar below. For more info on SS2BM, please visit the Pheebay SS2BM forum.

Summer Solstice to Blue Moon (SS2BM) Site Search

Mystorespace.com Founders Kicked Out of eBay Inc.'s Live Convention for Mentioning Google Checkout

An attendee at eBay Live last week in Boston reports on his blog, Google Blogoscoped, seeing two other eBay Live attendees being kicked out of the closing gala by eBay security....the two men were wearing Google polo shirts. The author brought this amusing article to my attention. At first he thought the men were Google employees. It turns out however, that they were probably actually the owners of a new eCommerce store building software design site, Mystorespace.com. A seemingly revolutinary new WYSIWYG store builder that offers Google Checkout and not Paypal.

The founder of Mystorespace.com writes about the incident in his blog. He feels he was ejected from Live for telling other attendees about the benefits of Google Checkout, which his site uses as the sole payment module currently. He says that Gary Briggs (eBay VP of Marketing) ask their intentions and then left to get some big bouncers to remove the two owners of Mystorespace.com. He details the whole incident on his blog, and rather than regurgitate the whole ridiculous (on eBay's part) incident, I suggest that you just read his article, here.

Did Anyone See eBay Had a Sale Last Weekend - Does Anyone Care

UPDATE: It seems that eBay finally pulled the auction mentioned near the end of this article, with 6 hours to go, and after a lengthy discussion on the eBay forums and repeated reports by users. EbayMotorsSucks.com has the summary HERE.

eBay Inc. had a listing sale promotion on eBay Motors this past weekend. Doesn't anyone care? In what looks like a virtually unprecedentedly poor showing, the number of listings on eBay this weekend actually went DOWN during the listing special. The promotion was actually a big money saver for those who wanted to take advantage of it. eBay offered Motors listings for only a buck, that's right, $1. That's a $39 savings off the regular fees! If the vehicles listed during the promotion sell, they are still subject to a $40 FVF, but heck, with a chance to save $39 per listing, I would have guessed that a lot of individuals and many large dealerships would have jumped at the chance to save money and bring in some cash flow.

The chart below is from Medved. It shows that listing on the site actually decreased by over half a million listings during the two day sale.

So what does this mean? I really don't know as I do not have the pre-sale category count for eBay motors. But, this is the first time that I can remember eBay offering a sale of this magnitude and actually getting a negative net turnout. This was another one of those sales that eBay gave plenty of warning about, and it even lasted two days - still it seems that nobody cares.

According to eBayMotorsSucks.com, fraud on eBay motors continues to be a major problem for both sellers and buyers - not to mention eBay management who can't seem to get a handle on the fraud. One particularly disturbing article on EMS is about an auction for a classic car that was apparently being sold by someone other than the owner - who had recently purchased the car. The new owner reported the scam to eBay and yet two days later the auction is still going with the "seller" canceling all bids and asking bidders to email him. Read it all and see the screenshots of the listing and eBay forum discussion and judge for yourself.

Summer is usually a slow time on eBay. Sellers report lower sell-through rates and lower prices, listing numbers go down, and usually the stock price slides a bit. As I type this, eBay's listing numbers are levitating just above 10 million in core. If the summer blahs are setting in for eBay numbers, it could be a long summer, and eBay might see listings that number below 10 million consistently for the first time since 2003.