Lynn Reedy, Senior Vice President, Product, Development and Architecture, explained eBay's new billing system to AuctionBytes last week during eBay's annual user conference.

Reedy said eBay's original billing system was a custom-made program and lacked financial controls. It was not set up to efficiently handle the more varied types of promotions that eBay was holding. These shortcomings caused the technical team to begin researching vendors for a new solution 2 years ago. It took them 6 months to select a vendor and a year to work with that vendor on eBay's new billing system. They also had to build a payment gateway with a consultant.

eBay programmers spent 2 months testing the component features. The "end-to-end" system testing took 3 months. They pushed through 5,000 - 10,0000 test cases and fixed the bugs. eBay also conducted five "mock conversions" where they pushed through 100% of the sellers to the new system in a testing environment.

Reedy explained that the testing environments were as close as you can get to rolling out onto the eBay live site, "but it isn't there." The testing environment is not dynamic, she said, the test is not impacted by a live site. There was no way the current glitch could have been detected in the testing environment, she said.

On February 16, 2004, the new billing system went live, and eBay rolled out a small percentage of sellers in a pilot test. This phase was called Live-to-Site Zero. The pilot test went smoothly, and the plan was to roll out the rest of the seller accounts in 3 phases: Live-to-Site 1; Live-to-Site 2; and Live-to-Site 3.

When eBay rolled out Live-to-Site 1, there were problems: the new system put double-charges on the accounts. Reedy explained that during the conversion, the online site charged the accounts while at the same time, the accounts were charged in the conversion process.

eBay refuses to reveal how many accounts were effected, but Reedy said, "a small portion got overcharged." She said "testing could not have picked this up. We changed the conversion program, and Live-to-Site 2 worked perfectly."

"For the folks that were affected, we processed reversals of those transactions, but it would show up on their account because of the financial controls - anything that happens has to show up on the account." This means that while the balance was fixed, all of the charges and credits were recorded on the account records. Over the next 3 days, eBay put in credits on those accounts, then did the payment processing.

But eBay could not reverse double-charges for a certain number of accounts. eBay did not immediately process these accounts so that those customers would not have to pay for the overcharges.

Reedy said, "There were a handful of folks we couldn't reverse the charges, but we didn't put them through the payment processing until the next invoice - this occurred in the April and May timeframe. Part of the frustration comes out of the necessary steps we had to take to make sure the accounts were caught up and they paid what they owed."

During this time, eBay fell behind in processing the May bills, and bills went out in the first part of June for May transactions. In the latter part of June, eBay sent out invoices for June. The billing system is now current, according to Reedy.

The remaining seller accounts will be moved over to the new system in July in the final "Live-to-Site 3" process.

How to Tell if Your Account Has Been Converted to the New Billing System
If you are not sure if your account is in the new billing system, check your seller account status. If you see a column for item titles, your account is in the new system. If you do not see any item titles, your account has not yet been moved to the new system.

Note: See main article at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m06/i30/s01