Ebay the Pasha Bulker
The more I use Ebay lately, the more I realise it has become the Pasha Bulker of web applications. It is a bulk freighter, burdened by its own cumbersome mass, unable to quickly change direction to avoid trouble before running aground.
I had a laptop listed on Ebay for the past ten days. During most of that period, a legitimate looking Aussie buyer held the winning big. Yesterday, the final day, I received a dodgy message asking “Hi, will you send to Indonesia?”. I immediately suspected it was a dodgy scam, not really standing out among the other 20 or so fraudulent messages I’d received during the 10 day listing duration. So I ignored the message.
However, within the final 30 seconds of the auction, this same dodgy Indonesian Ebay member outbid the Aussie bidder by about $200. I suspected something dodgy, but anyway awaited payment. This morning, I received the following crap from Ebay:
The results of the following listings have been cancelled due to bidding activity that took place without the account owner’s authorisation:
We have temporarily suspended the bidding account and we are working with the account owner to prevent any further unauthorised activity. Since the account owner did not initiate these bids, fees resulting from the listings in question have been credited to your account.
Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to automatically relist these items for you. Instead, to relist these items you will need to start from the beginning of the listing process, either through the “Sell Your Item” process or through your third party listing service. We know that this is an inconvenience and we apologise for the negative impact it may cause you. We are working on tools to allow you to relist your items without starting from the beginning, but they are not available at this time.
Please do not respond to this email, as your reply will not be received. If there are issues that have not been addressed by this message, you can contact us by clicking the “Help” link located at the top of most eBay pages and selecting “Contact Us” from the menu on the left hand of the page.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Regards,
eBay Trust & Safety
I am definitely appreciative of the fact that they realised this guy was fraudulent. However, the problem being that they had now completely wiped all record of my listing. So it was no longer in My Ebay whatsoever - 100% totally lost. I couldn’t offer the legitimate Aussie bidder a “second chance offer” and I lost all the detailed specification text that I’d spent ages in putting together so that the ad was informative and useful to prospective buyers. Ugh!
So the lesson learnt would be always keep your own offline backups of any long and detailed text that you save into an Ebay auction, just incase they lose the lot and you can’t get it back. Additionally, when you’re selling expensive electronic/technology items, block overseas buyers. Chances are they would be able to get the same machine cheaper than from in Australia anyway.
Although I am starting to hate the Ebay product, I just can’t think of any other prominent web site with the potential to sell the laptop for a strong price. Frustrated and confused, I had no choice but to spend the time re-listing on Ebay, however with a few key changes to the listing. This meant trimming and preparing the photos in Photoshop again and cutting and pasting lots of specification text back into a fresh listing. Total time wasted approximately 1 hour. This time, the item won’t be available to overseas buyers and I have trimmed down the accepted payment methods.
With any luck, it might sell for a higher price this time as compensation for the ordeal.
Tags: internet