I’m hoping this will force both PayPal and eBay to clean up their acts.
My personal peeve (one that I considered many times whether I could write an email to them explaining my irritation - but being well aware that it would probably be more beneficial to stand outside my house whispering my concerns to the cats outside during the night…) is that of ALL of their communication mails, particularly messages from users have so much crap in them!
The amount of bullshit that sits above and below the main message is just… awful. Reading through a conversation thread involves picking out the bits and bobs and warnings either side of each comment - and that’s when it works. Today I had a message which was just HTML spat out into the messaging system.
Anyhow. That’s my cathartic rat over for the day. Thanks guys 
whispering my concerns to the cats outside
cathartic rat
Unintentional awesomeness?
On topic, I’ve mostly stopped using ebay to buy and sell stuff. I created my account there in '99 and spent a few years buying and selling almost weekly, but it’s tapered down to almost nothing for a number of years now. Too many flaky buyers, too many scams, and prices that are usually higher than Amazon’s without the delivery/satisfaction guarantees.
On the plus side, I’m less likely to get stabbed during a scam on ebay than one on Craigslist.
I’ve been a business seller on ebay for over five years now, and this will probably be our last year on there. It simply isn’t worth the hassle of dealing with ebay. Seller support is hopeless and I only expect it to get worse. They have sacked a lot of the UK based staff recently- mostly SME account managers etc.
We sell £thousands a month on ebay, yet it’s almost impossible to actually get any problems resolved, the phone lines always have massive queues and usually the person you are speaking to doesn’t have the authority to solve anything. We used to be able to email to get support, now they simply don’t reply.
It will hurt ebay? Boom time for Tiny violin manufacturers everywhere!
They’re all on Alibaba now, anyway.
Ebay is like the internet equivalent of your local cable company. If you live in an area where you have very limited (1 or 2) alternatives, sucky service is slightly better than nothing at all. Ebay started as a giant online rummage sale, but has been drifting away from that model at an accelerating rate, displeasing both buyers and sellers. Until someone starts up a better alternative, we are stuck with the mousetrap we’ve got.
Very true! And eBay (surprisingly) has excellent mobile apps that offer a much better experience than the crusty old website crap.
Sort of a case study in building a better experience on the newer platform, because you can’t change the old one due to all the innumerable legacy hooks it has…
As an ex paypalian and ebayer, I would be happy to answer questions I legally can.
The legacy hook that surprises me with ebay is allowing arbitrary HTML in descriptions. Don’t they even allow Iframes on offsite content? IFRAMES! The insurance against the attention/distraction tricks it allows seems to basically be “don’t worry, we will always screw the seller if you don’t like your purchase”
Which is another thing they won’t be able to do anymore if they don’t control the payment system…
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