Ethical Technologies' website went down early last week and is still inaccessible. No explanation has been forthcoming from the company or from eBay.

AuctionBytes reported on Ethical Technologies' financial troubles in late January. Ethical Technologies founder Scott Samuel said at the time that the company was facing financial problems consisting of debt of more than $450,000. (He later retracted that figure.) He said eBay had threatened to pull Ethical Technologies' access to the eBay API for failure to pay its bills, but was in the process of working out a payment plan with eBay (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m01/i31/s01).

One seller who was using Ethical's sell-through tool wrote to say he lost nearly $2000 in eBay fees due to the ongoing outage, which started late on March 14 and resulted in his auctions failing to extend. He said he has not heard from the company and said the main office number had been disconnected. Scott Samuel did not return messages AuctionBytes sent via email and left on his cell phone.

Ethical Technologies was the first vendor to provide a tool that extended auctions to increase sell-through rates, and eBay initially stated it would prohibit the company from marketing the tool (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m08/i17/s02), but eBay later gave it the green light (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m09/i26/s01).

Other vendors that now provide sell-through tools are Vendio and AuctionSage.