Hi everyone,
If you've read my previous posts you'll know that pretty much all the issues with ebay like the new feedback system or other various annoyances you hear about don't really bother me. As I've said in the past, overall I'm pretty thrilled with the opportunity ebay provides our company in terms of world wide sales. But something happened to me this week that has rocked my opinion of ebay.
Monday morning I received an email from ebay that an auction of mine for a Ferrari jacket had ended due to copyright violation, IE. Ferrari was claiming it was a fake. Now I have a contact at Ferrari in Italy whom I had been working with for over a year whom I would email pictures of items I found to get the ok or not ok as to whether they were legit before listing them. I hadn't been in contact with him for a few months because over time, in working with him, I had gotten to know what to look for to determine the authenticity. This is why I knew that my jacket was legit. I emailed the contact provided in the email from ebay at Ferrari with some additional pictures of the jacket, even though there were plenty in the listing itself to see clearly it was legit. During this communication I realized that my contact had moved to another department and was replaced by the guy who claimed my item was fake. After viewing my additional pictures he realized he had made a mistake and that the item was in fact legitimate. Now during this back and forth I received a second email from ebay identical to the first one. Following that came another email stating that my account had been suspended for 7 days. Once Ferrari guy realized his error he immediately notified ebay and my account was reinstated by 7pm the same day.
Ebay notified me that they had reinstated the listing for the Ferrari jacket as well, and that it was put into my ended items folder and that all I had to do was relist it. Now here's the kicker...but they deleted all my 1600 plus listings (auction and store items) and those they COULD NOT recover.
So now my store is empty (50% of my sales come from our store) and I have to redo 1600+ items from scratch, pictures and all. It's going to take me about a month of working overtime to get back on track and I no doubt will lose thousands of dollars all for something in which I was not at fault. After bitching to ebay's customer service department (if there is such a thing) I finally found one guy with a shred of compassion who actually offered some sort of apology and who reinstated a whopping 130 of my listings. My question is if they can recover 130 listings, INCLUDING the one that caused all this mess, then why can't they get all my store listings back into my ended items folder so I can simply relist? I'm completely sure they can, but obviously they just don't feel like it. I even emailed Isabel a couple of days ago explaining my situation and I haven't even got a response.
Last fall it was bothering me a little bit that we (quoting my new favourite bookseller) had too many of our eggs in one ebay basket. So in January we moved into an office which doubles as a store, open two days a week, and we've seen steady growth there. Today I am convinced I had a premonition back in the fall about what happened this week. This fiasco has only accelerated our efforts to find other ways outside of ebay to move our stuff and it is now our objective to reduce ebay to 25% of our sales channels within 2 years.
You know, I understand the need to protect the marketplace and I have no issues with the suspension...we were allowed to work it out and I was back on within hours, that's fine. But deleting all our auctions before allowing due process??? That is not only not fair, to me it borders on criminal. Those listings have to be somewhere.
The icing on the cake was later this week we received a call from the ebay seller outreach program wanting to sit down with us on the phone because we are a "top seller" and one of ebay's "most important" blah blah blah. They want to help us to take our business to the next level, meanwhile earlier in the week they took our business two steps backwards.
Bottom line we've decided we won't let ebay or anyone else for that matter take us hostage. I'm not a fool, I won't let the fact that I don't like them very much right now cloud me to the reality that I can still make money here. They use us and I for damn sure will continue to use them to line my pockets. But they've turned us into someone who wants to work less with them now. Someone's missing the boat over there.
If anyone has had any similiar experiences and actually has some ideas or tips on how I might be able to get those listings back I'd be appreciate any input.
