Category: Complaints

OK, time to rip into eBay. They’ve annoyed plenty of people over the last year or so with countless changes in policy, but I’m going to have a go at them for simply being inept. Thankfully I don’t really use the thing any more after I flogged all my old crap before I left the UK in 2006, as I think I’d go mad with them.

The story begins when I got a load of emails, seemingly from my own email account, directed at various sellers asking them questions on sales. Thing is, every person targeted was non-English and the question was in garbled English. I then started getting replies from the sellers, usually along the lines of “I don’t speak English, sorry”.

Now, I genuinely have no idea how anyone got my eBay password when I don’t think I’ve logged into it for months. Regardless, it’s not a big worry. I just log in and change my password, right?

Wrong.

By the time I tried to do that, eBay had already part-locked my account and I had to go through the “forgot password, set a new one” routine. In itself, not a problem.

Wrong.

Email arrives from eBay telling me I need to do this. Fine. I go to the site (which I can still log on to at this point), and click on “forgot password”. I then get taken to a screen that asks for my login name, and some other details (personal question, date of birth and the like). I fill these in and click the button. I duly get another mail with a further link in it. I guess for them to check the email address they have is correct. No use if the hacker had changed it, but never mind.

I click the new link and get to another page asking me to enter my username. OK, I enter it and click again. A message says another email with further instructions will be sent. It never arrived, despite my repeating this umpteen times. I am now completely locked out of the website.

I email eBay to explain the situation. It’s symptomatic of the system failing – it’s not sending the mails out and it’s redirecting to the wrong page. I also found that I couldn’t get to the “contact us” page – it was redirecting to their version of the “404 – Page Not Found” error. I’ve seen this before on eBay. They really should be more careful with their delete key.

So I gave up.

On Sunday I tried again and “lo” it worked. No problems. Whatever glitch there was had been cleared up. I got all the emails, clicked all the links, changed my password and the world was a better place. Finally.

Then I check my email on Monday morning and I have a reply from eBay relating to my message on Friday telling them I had problems. They’ve relocked my account as it’s been accessed since that first email – because their system started working. I now try to get in and I’m told my account is blocked, but it’s OK as they can verify me by phone.

Only the phone number they have is incorrect and I can’t change it as I can’t log in… it does let me go through the steps of changing, but then refuses to let me save the changes.

ARSE.

So I fired off the following email. Apologies for the lack of gratuitous swearing, but you never know if mails will be bounced for bad language these days. I’m just going to leave it till I’m at the folks next weekend and therefore near the phone line I have listed. That way I can just run through the system without involving the workshy lackies in whatever office my mail went to. Assuming the damn site’s working next weekend.

Oh FFS.

I finally managed to get into the account yesterday and changed my password to something new – two days after I started trying. Frankly, the problems I had seemed to stem from a broken website which was finally fixed.

Only now I can’t get in as you’ve eventually acted on the mail I sent on the 24th and *re*locked my account. I can’t get in via the front page as it wants to call my telephone for confirmation and I’m currently residing around 20 miles away from that phone line. I can’t update the phone number as *you’ve locked me out of my account again*.

If you’d actually paid attention to an email sent on Friday instead of waiting two whole days to actually do something about it – or, indeed if your website hadn’t sent me round in circles – this wouldn’t have happened.

Frankly, I can see why people are leaving eBay in droves. You seem to have less concern for customer care than a bank. And that really is saying something.

Look, forget it. Leave everything alone. You’re obviously not capable of dealing with a simple help request in a timely fashion. I’ll wait till the weekend when I’m *at* my parents, go through the system as it’s set up and just hope you’re web site doesn’t fall down again. It’s got to be better than involving a human again.

Yours,

(etc)