At the beginning of the year I decided to sell some of my old crap on eBay, to make a little money and be rid of some clutter. But my experience was in fact, not what I hoped it would be. In fact the way eBay behaved was astonishing. So allow me to share (and vent).
I started off selling some Maui Jim sunglasses. I have some Tag Heuer's which are better, and frankly Maui Jim lenses are very prone to picking up finger prints, where as the Tag's have a special treatment that makes them stay clean more easily. Anyhow, I put them on eBay.
Sure enough I get a sale right away. This eBay shit is just too easy. So I send off an invoice and hear nothing. I wait, I message my buyer, and literally two hours before I was eligible to complain to eBay about it (six days and 22 hours later), I get some bleeding heart email about how he has no money and won't be able to afford them for two months.
In this economic crisis, I am not going to make a big deal out of this. Times are tough, although one has to wonder why someone is looking for $200 sunglasses if they are in financial trouble.
Anyway, after much wasted time I ended up paying to relist them all over again, and finally sold them.
Around the same time, I also sold a game from my old PS2 for a grand total of $5.55 plus shipping. I was hardly jumping for joy at selling a game I probably spent $29.99 on for $5.55, but what can you do.
I was very pleased to see that the buyer paid immediately for the game, and prepared to ship it. I planned on going to the post office the next day. Unfortunately when I went to look at the buyer's address, it was complete except there was no street address. I had a name, and a city. That was it.
So I emailed the buyer and told him I'd ship as soon as he let me know his address. I waited, and heard nothing. I sent several more messages to the guy and there was no response. I emailed eBay and they suggested I follow a multi step procedure to obtain his phone number, place a long distance call to some teenager in Arizona and try and get him to give me (some random guy off the Internet) his home address. Suffice to say, I'm not doing that.
I wrote several more messages both to the kid and to eBay, but to no avail.
About two weeks later I get a rude email from my buyer, it read:
"hey why havent you sent me my game im getting mad its been a week please send it i will still give good feedback if it comes in the next 1-3 days."
Despite the obvious reality I was dealing with a child, at least we had opened a line of communication. So a few minutes later, I replied and again reminded him that the incompetent cretins at eBay had failed to obtain his correct address when he signed up, and that I clearly could not ship a game to him without an email address.
Six days later, having ignored a couple more emails and eBay internal messages from me, I get this:
"You were paid JAn 23, Were is the item, Negative feedback wll be left. This after paying for your expesive shipping. Thank You Loser"
Hmm. So now, I'm a loser. My 'expesive [sic] shipping' was $2.99 by the way. The actual shipping cost came to $2.77 including delivery confirmation; pretty reasonable I thought. If anyone knows a cheaper way of shipping half way across the country, I'd love to hear it.
Again I responded, again I explained that I did not have his address. He replied the same day:
"sorry about the message my internet was slow so it did'nt show the message that you sent me sorry and thank you for buisness."
Great, so now it seems like the retard has figured out how to read his messages. Thank fuck for that. But did he give me his address? Of course not.
Nine days later my errant teen buyer finally figured out that I could not ship an item without an address. So he finally sent me his address four times, and posted negative feedback on my account. It read:
"Never sent item, no communications, this even after paying for express shipping."
Express shipping? For $2.99? Seriously?
Throughout this tedious process I messaged eBay over and over again asking for them to do something and questioning why they were letting members without a valid mailing address bid on items. They simply explained each time that there was nothing they could do.
When I asked them to escalate the matter to a supervisor, they shifted their attitude from not giving a fuck, to giving me the finger.
Here are some of their responses, which left me dumbfounded:
"eBay investigates and takes action against violations of policies, however, we are unable to take action on behalf of an individual member."
- Unable? I somehow doubt that is true.
"Because we aren't involved in the actual transaction, we can't force members to live up to their obligations."
- This was their response when I questioned why eBay did not perform even the most basic checks on their members, like ensuring that they had an address in their profile so that a seller could ship to them. But apparently, despite running the site, they are not 'involved.' That much certainly seems true.
"Even if a member leaves feedback that is unfair, untruthful, or harmful to a member's reputation, we can't remove it without a court order describing it as libel, defamation, or saying that the comment is illegal."
- So here eBay are claiming that the only way they can (or will) remove something from their web site is if it is illegal or they are forced to by a court order. Even if the comment is unfair, untrue, or harmful. Wow. Well eBay, you are fucking useless, your customer service is shit / nonexistent. You can all go fuck yourselves because you won't be getting another penny from me.
Unfortunately I cannot remove this opinion from my web site without a personal letter from the Queen of England, along with a Knighthood and £50m. Sorry, it's just my policy you malodorous bunch of douchebags.
"Again, we do understand that you feel very strongly about this issue."
- What finely honed, almost supernatural powers of observation you have. I'm getting chills, really.
"We have fully investigated this issue and have come to a point in which no further discussion is needed regarding this particular issue until more evidence can be provided. Although future emails from you will be read, unless they contain additional information for review or are about another topic altogether, we may not respond."
- Talk about customer service giving the finger. I honestly don't think I have ever been addressed with similar disdain from any company ever. Truly astonishing how eBay not only doesn't give a shit, but openly tells customers, not only don't we give a shit, but we are not even going to bother talking to you any more!
"It is my pleasure to assist you."
- It is my pleasure to know that your tedious life is spent sitting behind a computer dealing with complaints all day while earning fuck all. If this is how eBay treat paying customer, god knows how they treat their low level employees. But based on the content of this email, I don't really give a fuck.
So that's it, the story of why I am giving eBay the finger and why I encourage you to do the same. They fail to provide even the most basic levels of reasonable service and then refuse to play any part in attempting to rectify their fuck ups.
They charge too much, and if they are ever asked to help they lie about their obligations or capabilities.
I truly am sad to have had to write this. I always thought the concept of eBay was a good one, and always had a fairly positive opinion of them. I gave them multiple chances to try and make this situation they created right, and all I got was something between indifference and insulting.
In this economic climate with major corporations going out of business all the time, now is certainly not the time to get cocky and lacking in the customer service department.
If you have a story you'd like to share about eBay being shit, please feel free to make a comment on it.
