Ebay Customer Service

[monsterwardrobe]

I have been buying & selling on Ebay for over 14 years & chose to open an account about 2 years ago to seperate my buying from my selling.

6 months after opening the account & selling without a hitch, my personal circumstances changed & I received 2 negative feedback comments in a row & did not use Ebay again up until recently.

Upon logging in, my account had been indefinitely suspended & also limited my buying account which I had sold on previously for over 13 years, however they could not tell me why, just that I was indefinitely suspended from selling.

I have been trying to get to the bottom of this with Ebay Customer service via email & phone for the past 2 weeks yet no one seemed to be providing me with answers.

The first person I spoke to advised me I was a 'risk to Ebay community safety' & provided me with the wrong customer service email address to forward my query to! 

When I finally did speak to a helpful service representative who I was able to explain my circumstances, he said that he would lodge a report & that Ebay would contact me for furthur information to discuss my account details & 'business plan' despite the fact I am an individual seller- not a store, selling between 20 - 50 items per month.

5 days later, still no response from Ebay so I follow them up requesting to know whether they require anything from me yet & receive a rather blunt email back stating that the person I spoke to told me there was an indefinite suspension placed on my account, this had been advised by the last customer service representative & that there is nothing furthur to investigate.

This isn't what I was told at all & just seems to me the person who responded was just skimming account notes to meet her response quota.

2 negatives surely cannot lead to an indefinite suspension, there are many sellers out there with multiple negatives who are still allowed to trade, so why am I indefinitely suspended? My account is clean apart from the 2 negatives, no fees were outstanding so I dont understand what is wrong here.

Is there somewhere apart from the useless Trust & Safety department I am able to have my account questions answered as I do not understand why after years of selling without a problem, 2 negative comments result in an indefinite selling suspension.

Is anyone here able to shed some light? Is this some new policy I am not aware of?

[lyndal1838]

Oh dear, if your other IDs were suspended you are not allowed to open another one.

Maybe that is one reason the ebay reps are annoyed with you.

I can not help wondering if there were some issues with one of your other accounts that surfaced during the time you were not logging in to ebay.  If you were not responding to ebay or paypal then they may well have been assuming you had done a bunk.

[monsterwardrobe]

My buying account had no issues, I had not bid on or bought anything for quite some time on it, so there were no outstanding issues there - so I don't understand why that has been limited, the accounts were only linked as I use the same Paypal account to pay for my purchases as I do to receive funds for items sold.

There were no Paypal cases or issues with Ebay, just the 2 negative feedback comments for items taking too long to reach buyers, there was nothing requiring my action & certainly nothing requiring an indefinite suspension.

[tstore]

Once you are indefinitely suspended, you are not permitted to open any new accounts nor hold any other accounts. Perhaps you can ask eBay if you can fax them 100 points of ID as around 10 years ago I had the same issue and they requested this. My suspension was lifted. Was your bills paid on your eBay account as well?

[haolove13]

A friend of mine has suffered a similar situation.

He suffered a series of vindictive low ratings(DSR) and had a large sum of Paypal money frozen for six months (Just in case there was a new claim made against him despite all sales being finalised.)

Dealing with Paypal is like dealing with the CIA and gets nowhere. Whenever you get emails they are contradictory and you speak with people in Asia, Ireland and Salt Lake city. Nothing is cohesive and basically you are scarred for life.

If you start a claim through the financial industry ombudsman any funds in your account will be frozen until the case is closed and any income you may get in that time is also at risk.

It could be that despite getting positive feedback if you did not keep an eye on the anonymous DSR scores somebody could be leaving vindictive low DSR (my friend got 65 1 and 2 scores from one person for multiple items in 2 transactions.) That resulted in his account having very low selling limits placed on it and eventually he gave up on Ebay.

Once you are marked it seems to be impossible to get away from it, and Ebay / paypal say it is good to keep it anonymous.

As an example of how unbalanced things can be I had dealings with a chinese seller who has had 312 negatives this monthbut that is balanced out by 21,000 positives.

The point is though that they are receiving 10 negatives a day..So Ebay will continue to rake in the dollars because of sheer volume, and if someone is unlucky to have a couple of glitches they will hammer you.

That shows where the principles and ethics are.

[billexploited]

Ebay Customer service is appalling in the Philippines! They can't speak english

[clarry100]

I just had some correspondence from eBay Customer Support that gives some hope that there may be a glimmer of hope yet for seller support. Something that does appear to be lacking.

I had a simple case of a non-payer. We get lots of them. More & more in recent times.

I sent a reminder message on day-3 and they responded rather angrily that they were having some difficutly with their PayPal.

So I gave them another 3-days and with no further corro from the buyer, then I asked how was the PayPal problem going.

I got no answer to this so after 2 more days I opend a UID.

Then 2-days later I got a rather angry email accusing us of being liars, mean and not passing bank details when they had asked twice. No such request was ever made.

So the next thing I know I get a message from ebay saying that this buyer had complained about our service.

I sent them back a message stating the facts and asked them to look at the messages between us and the buyer.

I just got a message back today saying that we had done all the right things and that they had looked at this buyer's history and appropriate action has been taken on their account. They did not say what action but just that they will see next time they log in. Perhaps their account has been suspended.

I hope so as we don't need this kind of buyer on eBay.

[won-the-woman]

The ones i've spoken to speak good enough English it's just that they're polite parrots without anything resembling an autonomous brain. I have nightmares hearing that American inflected Phillipine voice saying "Hello sir how are you today...uhuh uhuh.... oh i'm sorry sir" In a perfect world i'd never deal with any company that has Phillipines CS.

[li.vish]

Hello, everyone. This discussion is getting a little heated. Could we please communicate with a more civil tone. Thanks!

[wehavethatau]

eBay has customer support?