This morning I received annoyingly non-committal emails from Paypal and eBay about a “problem” with one of my purchases. I was informed that the listing violated eBay’s terms of service in some way. As a customer of eBay I was frustrated.
Issue #1 – Why do eBay and Paypal continue to pretend that they aren’t the same company?
I should have received one email from the combined company with directions. One potential explanation is that eBay has failed to fully integrate Paypal over the past few years. I recognize eBay’s desire to grow Paypal as an internal and external brand. Since a huge proportion of their sales overlap, there should be much more coordination by this point. Another, more nefarious explanation is that it allows them the flexibility to point fingers at each other and not take full responsibility. In the past when purchasing magazine subscriptions that never materialized I had to deal with the finger pointing responses. eBay needs to pull it together and start acting like a better coordinated company.
Issue #2 - Why is eBay so non-committal when it comes to terms of service violations and fraud?
The likely answer is that they are afraid of incurring any legal liability from actually accusing anyone of violating their terms of service. The email I received from eBay was that the auction had been pulled “for violating one or more of our policies.” Could that note be any less helpful? I could feel free not to follow through with the transaction. That’s great since it was an immediate payment buy it now transaction. Paypal sent an email telling me how to get to their dispute resolution center with no indication on whether I should use it or not.
I emailed customer service for Paypal to see if I could get more information. I could almost guarantee that Paypal will tell me to talk to eBay and eBay will tell me that they don’t release specific information. Someone had to actually tag and shutdown the auction with a reason code of some sort. Why can’t I see it? Tell me if you think it is a fraudster, the items are counterfeit, or if it was just some sort of action structure that wasn’t allowed.
What’s next?
Situations like this are a major reason why eBay’s growth is flat lining. eBay is great for two things, hard to find items and deals Too many people have had some poor experiences over the years and eBay seems reluctant to be transparent. eBay needs to face into the fact that users come to their site looking for deals. Often, deals that look too good to be true are just that. Users end up having a bad experience and then become reluctant to buy anything else. The user becomes concerned about their own ability to sniff out fraud and they aren’t confident that eBay is going to help. eBay loses that customer.
As someone with a reputation score close to 400 on eBay, I have completed a great many transactions. But my purchases in the past couple of years have fallen off drastically. In order to win me back as a regular buyer and seller, eBay needs to re-earn my trust. That’s a tough thing to do.
Update:
Paypal customer support did, just as I predicted, tell me absolutely nothing and direct me to contact eBay for more information. I asked them specifically not to point me to eBay in the email and they still did. In the meantime, the item arrived from the seller and appears to be fine. I believe the terms of service violation was for high shipping charges and a low auction value. eBay hates those since it gets only a small cut of the revenue. I’m still not entirely sure if that was their issue, though.
