Ebay ® unfortunately scammed me out of money by
stiff arming me in to paying for services not rendered and then they
ruined my reputation by saying that my
First off, a few months ago I had over 90 positive feedback with 100%
satisfaction on ebay. This was earned over years of transactions.
Unfortunately ebay ® recently made some changes that really hurt my
business in several ways. Including my business reputation, pocket book
and lots of wasted time.
I have been selling on ebay ® for years, however I began selling web
site hosting services on ebay quickly within one month racked up over
$400 promoting my products and business. I was offering a discounted
auction to give ebay ® users a great start up rate on web site hosting.
I was offering them an introductory rate of $.01 or $1 for a few 1 - 3
free months of services.
I soon found out that other ebay ® users were buying my auctions and
not signing up for hosting services, therefore costing me a large
amount of money. I later complaned about this (see below).
After some research I found out why I was getting a lot of people
buying my auctions and not signing up for my services. Turns out that
ebay ® created a search function that gives ebay ® users better
rankings if they have higher feedback rankings. Additionally ebay ®
implemented a feature that requires a certain amount of feedback for
users to be able to sell on ebay ®. So in essence what was happening
was people were bidding on my auctions that I paid ebay ® for, sending
me (often times) one penny and then requesting positive feedback. This
had me outraged because it was costing me large amounts of money to
list these auctions and costing a lot of money on marketing. Then a lot
of my auctions were being taken down by fake bidders.
Another thing that ebay ® did was remove ANY SELLERS ability to leave
negative feedback about buyers that treat sellers poorly, which makes
absolutely no sense because sellers are the only people that pay ebay
®. These people that help make ebay ® succeed in the stock market are
the ones getting treated terrible and not being able to protect
themselves from buyers abusing their system.
Fake bidders kept requesting I leave them positive feedback after
sending them a penny. I wanted to leave them negative feedback, however
since ebay ® removed this function, I was being held hostage by all
bidders to leave them positive feedback because they are the only ones
that can hurt my credibility by leaving me negative feedback. If I
didn't leave them feedback and they sent me money, they had the right
to leave me negative feedback.
On 9/4 I sent an email telling ebay ® the following: (exact message
below)
I have several hundred listings for hosting online. The reason I listed
all of these online was because I thought since people were bidding
they
were going to sign up for the service I was offering. So a few hundred
dollars later, it turns out 3 out of 4 people are bidding on my items
just to hold me hostage for positive feedback. This is terrible and
expensive. How can this be resolved?
I never received a response until 9/10 when ebay ® shut down my account
and hundreds of my auctions I spent around 50 hours working on. I was
astonished! I attempted to contact ebay ® regarding this on the phone,
however their phone number hangs up on you and does not offer any sort
of support. This company is very scarey, because I believe that
companies that treat customers like this are destined for failure.
After requesting help and spending hundreds of dollars with ebay ®, my
account was shut down. Not to mention, many legitimate
accounts I obtained ended up cancelling services from me because ebay®
sent them a letter saying that I was abusing their services and that
any feedback I left for them was not legitimate. This
type of thing was a major defamation of character for my business.
After everything I have paid around a thousand dollars paying and
improving my ebay ® auctions, put in tons of hours and feel abused by
ebay ®. I also am shutting down several companies that I run that use
paypal ® as a payment provider.
Obviously this is all my personal opinion and ebay ® and paypal ® are
all Designated trademarks and brands that are the property of their
respective owners.
Regards,
Joel McLaughlin
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ethics-articles/
big-corporation-stepping-on-the-little-guy-ebay-scams-sellers-
556697.html
About the Author
Joel Mclaughlin is a search optimization guru
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