Archive for September, 2006

Last weekend, without notice, eBay closed all 400 some of my auctions. They sent me some vague canned email stating that my listing were closed because I was trying to circumvent eBay fees. Everyone who was bidding on one of the auctions as well as customers that recently won and paid for one of my eBay auctions received a notice from eBay stating that I was in violation of an eBay policy and my listings were removed. WTF? I had customers contacting me freaking out thinking I just ripped them off. I later found out what the problem was. I had the URL to my website built into the banner image I used in my auctions. eBay didn’t like that. Once I knew this it took me all of 3 minutes to remove the URL from the image in Photoshop and re-upload it to my webserver. It would have been nice if they would have just told me to fix it to begin with instead of trying to wreck my business.

I lost a ton of sales from this and my reputation with my customers was tainted. I had to do something. And I did. I marked all the items on my website half off and email thousands of my past customers to announce my “eBay sucks” sale. The response was fantastic. I had so many customers email me back to give me their support and in some cases their own story about how eBay screwed them over that it took me days to read all of them. The sale was also a big hit. I made enough sales from it to cover my loss of eBay sales from the closed auctions.

But wait there’s more. Since eBay closed all my auctions, including my store items, they had to credit me back the eBay fees for them. They not only had to credit back my listing fees, but also my final value fees because they emailed customers who had won auctions to tell them I was bad and they didn’t have to pay me. They emailed customers that had won auctions and paid for them months and months and months ago. The end result, I received a credit of over $800. So this all started with them thinking that I was trying to circumvent fees and it ends with them crediting me back for eight hundred buck of the fees. That sure makes a lot of sense, don’t it? Thanks eBay!

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