Ebay’s big problem

September 1, 2009 – 12:17 pm – No Comment

Today’s big news is that Ebay will be selling off a huge portion of Skype, but in my house we can’t log in to the website due to a “closer alignment between Ebay and Half.com.”

What is happening is that when Chris attempts to log into his Ebay account, he gets a message saying that he needs to enter in his credit card information before he can continue. The next page is hosted on an old credit card processing server for Ebay and it (at least at one point in time) is legit. After he enters in his information he gets an error message that says, “Sorry, we cannot process your request at this time, please try again later.” This is on a page that is full of broken images.

After that it sends him back to Ebay’s homepage, and he’s still not logged in.

Every time one of us calls Ebay they give us the run around, won’t let us talk to a technical support person, and also tries to play it off like we have a virus on our computers. I know that all customer support people are trained to assume that most customers are computer illiterate and have downloaded 44 viruses on their computers and don’t know how to clear their cache, but I suppose we’re the exception. We have three computers and are completely unable to log in to Chris’s account due to the Half.com error.

So, here we are, we’ve spoken to three different people at Ebay: One on the online chat and two on the phone. The situation has yet to resolve itself so we started looking at online forums to see what other people are doing and there are people out there who haven’t been able to log into their Ebay accounts for months due to this error.

I suppose if it came down to it, Chris could sell on my Ebay account, but he has spent the last two years building up his feedback and credibility on his account and now he has regular customers.

This post may sound a bit scatterbrained, but we’re both pretty fed up with the entire situation and are starting to consider selling on Amazon and other internet sites to just try to stop this problem from happening again. Ebay (and PayPal) have been nothing but a headache for the past month anyway. After a package was lost in the mail and the customer didn’t pay for insurance on it, PayPal decided that (even though we had plenty of proof that the item was shipped and the Post Office will back up this claim) it would be holding onto the money until the package was delivered. Over 2 months later, the package was delivered and we got the money, but we really couldn’t figure out what is the point of offering insurance.