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Hi,
Thanks for your article on ebay glitches-it is welcome to hear any balanced commentary outside of ebay's spins and press releases. I have been a full time seller for two years. Since July I have watched my sales drop to a third of beginning of the year averages. Not only have changes and glitches not benefited me-they have served to actually impede successful transactions, be it mail not getting thru the sytem, bidders unable to bid and, in general, a site that is less and less user friendly.

The frustrations of, doing it in spite of ebay, are weekly and sometimes daily. The only consolation comes in reading the boards, to find out I am not alone. Something is seriously amiss, and one would also have to think that the problems also affect the coveted corporate accts., as well as the small volume users. While I believe that the complaints are read by ebay, the response is perceived as one of arrogance and reverting responsibility to the users: a corporate disdain for their customers.

Thanks for your time. Keep up the fair reporting.
M

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Hi Ina,
Read your only-too-true story about ebay glitches this morning. You probably don't even know the HALF of it, Ina. We are super pressed for time but you may want to be made aware of some of the other problems....

Back in October ebay introduced the feature of Easy to buy and they suggested to all ebay sellers that we insert the HTML in ALL of our listings in Oct so they would be ready to start up Oct 30 when the promotion would begin. SO...took TWO full days and did this! OK, when the promotion began in November......guess what? When you tried to do a RELIST....this function did NOT work and would not let you use on a relisting of an item.

SO......upon calling power seller support and trying other help solutions on ebay, wasting nearly half a day on the phone.....they were not YET aware there was a glitch....SO had to UNINSERT all the html for the special promotion, (took another two FULL days) as there were 500+ listings it applied to. Now, ebay PSS agreed that ALL the listings that we HAD inserted the html into for the promo were correct and DID qualify for the promotion. Another call to ebay the following week stated that now OTHER sellers had reported the same problem and they had ESCALATED it to tech support but still had no fix for it! OK....forward to Dec and STILL no fix!

So it cost us a FULL five days to insert, uninsert and talk to tech support!

UNbelievable. This NEVER appeared on the announcement board that there were ANY problems with this NOR did the blocked bidder problems EVER appear on the announcement board. We have made this suggestion to ebay PSS AND they dont' know why it did not appear. Actually if the blocked bidder list announcement had appeared EVER then many ebayers could have retried their blocked bidders and saved to disc or notepad as it apparently ate them all up slowly! These were OUR blocked bidders from 1997 and by the time we learned of the problem from your note this morning...ALL were lost! Called PSS and they have no input on the matter, they say and it is always "up to the ebay users to save any information as ebay is a BIG system and they never know when their servers can go down". WELL, we say that a general announcement would have been appreciated and asked that they pass that suggestion along to the powers that be!

Another MAJOR problem is the fact that ebay suggested that we use the function for the holidays that you must pay for the item with paypal immediately when you do a buy it now. They were also beginning another promotion at the same time and you could offer a shipping discount when you buy multiple items. We signed up for that too. BUT major problem, folks wanted to purchase several items with buy-it-nows and were quite willing to pay now with the shipping discounts offered, but the shipping discounts offer does not WORK with the buy-it-now, you must pay-now option so when people wanted to purchase four items and get the shipping discount, even though they wanted to PAY now too, had to close the auctions they were intereted in, restart NEW auctions for those items and REMOVE the "you-must-pay-now" if you purchased now option so they could get paypal to figure their shipping discounts for them. Quite a major horror story as NOW no one wants to do a buy it now as they can't combine purchases and are waiting for the auctions to end in 10 days to just purchase normally so they can get their discounts, bottom line is we are selling less, not more as ebay had suggested! OH how we wish they would just LEAVE everything alone from November to Jan 1 so we COULD actually sell more!

There are many other glitches and problems that have occurred in the past two weeks, but they are minor compared to the major annoyances you have listed and that we have mentioned above!

Hope you have a pleasant month in the cold north and may next year bring fortune, good health and great things to you and David!
Regards!
Barbara

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Dear Ina,
I love your newsletter it's informative and extremely enlightening.

I have been a seller for 3 years on Ebay. Lately however I have noticed that I will have a week of Auctions where all the high bidders are from one state. For instance this week I had 5 people from Arizona. Last week Missouri.

This has happened quite often as of late. Can you explain it? I'm sure it's not a coincidence. I also noticed that my auctions seemed to fall from a cliff at the end of June. I know that summer is slow but since I keep very accurate records on sales per month and year. It seemed very odd to me. Not entirely explainable by the state of the economy because the counters were off as well? Some incite on the above would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Best Regards,
Vicki

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Dear Ina,
Thank you for your great newsletter as I just read the recent one and I am devastated at how slow sales are on ebay and have been for me for like you said the last 4 months. I am a power seller but not hardly anymore, as my sales have dropped dramatically!

This is horrible and who can I write to complain to? Is ebay doing anything anymore for the small guy? It used to be great but now I am lucky to have 3 auctions won in my 40+ listings. This is tragic for us who depend on this for part of our living. Can you give me some hope for the future or do you feel many people are leaving because of these glitches and technical problems which ebay never tells us about :(

Well Christmas is only 3 weeks away and I don't feel good about this, please shed some light to me and let me know if there is anyone we can write to. Keep up the good work with your letter and thank you!!!
Sincerely,
Catherine

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Ina,
If you really want to know how the majority of Ebay sellers feel read some of the posts in ebay's "Discuss new features" board. People there are saying since they started to "Improve" the listing page in July Ebay has become FUBAR.

Seems like every day there is a new "Improvement" and nothing works the way it's supposed to.

Since Ebay bought out PayPal, it too is going down hill. 20% of the time I get no confirming email any more when a buyer has paid me with that service.

And if like you say MeggiePoo is CEO of the year, why is she down to 8% on the Forbes poll?

Seems like Ebay is only interested in getting their fees and screw the people that put them where they are now., Their attitude "If you don't like it sod off"

That "Powered by IBM" logo should be "Underpowered by IBM" that too is a joke.

What other major company hides their phone number? And makes it almost impossible to reach even by email? (Which they never answer anyhow) If you do mail them you get a generic reply with none of your concerns answered.

Am I bitter? You bet I am and so are a myriad of other sellers. Do check out the board I mentioned.
Respectfully:
Paul

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Hi,
I found this article especially interesting, just last night I was checking my own auctions and found that I couldn't access them. I always use the "search by seller" feature to check on my auctions and last evening I was not able to bring up most of my items. I would click on the auction number and then wait for nothing to appear. I tried this with every auction I have running and about half of them came back with nothing. Even going back and trying again brought the same result.

In another subject but related to Ebay, I would be interested in finding out how many people who have items listed on Half.com are upset about Ebay doing away with the site in the near future and having to relist all of their items on Ebay. I have over 3500 books and other items listed on Half.com and I do not look forward to having to relist them on Ebay if I want to sell them. I think Ebay is making a big mistake by doing away with Half.com. They should improve the Half.com site rather than eliminating it. To me it's just another case of one big corporation eating up and spitting out another in the name of profits. I think this would be a good story for Auctiuon Bytes to look into.
Pat

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Hello!
While it is true that eBay did SAY this last year (eBay moratorium), it was an out and out LIE. During that period, eBay introduced MORE changes to their site, than the previous 9 months COMBINED.

I felt obligated to point this out, as I was greatly, and negatively, impacted by these changes last year. (EBay had numerous site failures, and other problems because of these changes.)
Thanks.
Karl

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Hi,
Just received your newsletter about all the glitches on eBay. I would like to add that there are also major problems with signing in. That affects both sellers and buyers, and seems to be especially bad if the user has AOL. Sometimes, I have had to enter eBay through Internet Explorer just to be able to see My eBay page. Thank you for the opportunity to share this info.
Carol

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Hello:
Happy greetings!
I just read your article. I wasted many hours trying to communicate with ebay.