I am closing my second EBAY business in less than 60 days. I had an ebay store for 5 years (thegolfbarn) we sold typically between 4500 and 6500 a month. I had over 1000 products listed for sale, and then ebays automated policies put a hold on our ebay with over 50 orders in the que, we couldn't access our money to ship out the orders (to their own buyers) 😞 Very sad. Anyway our account became restricted because we had 3 open cases and they said that we had not responded to 2 of them. NOT TRUE. One case was because a customer was returning a set of golf grips (fairly typical open case). The customer put in a bogus tracking number, the grips never came back to us. EBAY said we didn't respond. I responded to that case several times, as the customer had asked to return for a refund, and I said yes once the items are returned. The other case was for a .99 cent piece of golf tape that we ship via envelope with a postage stamp. Our customers would open up cases fairly often for this item because the post office is so slow. These cases were always closed once the customer received their item. I marked the item shipped in the open case, however could not provide a tracking number because there was none. Once again EBAY said we didn't respond to the customer (NOT TRUE). Not only did we send another piece of tape we contacted the customer via email message.
So after 5 years of running an EBAY store and making over 200,000.00 in sales, they just put our paypal on hold without a message or even phone call. I was on the phone for over a week trying to get this resolved. They wouldn't even release our funds from the sales we made to ship to EBAY customers. I requested that a supervisor contact me each time I was on the phone (hours) and I did not receive one phone call (Wow they truly dont care about their sellers).
We sold over 10,000 items and shipped them promptly and because their system is incapable of handling situations correctly, our small family business suffered greatly. We shipped on our own credit cards and many packages were late, as I did not want to use our credit cards to ship, and was on the phone for over a week trying to get EBAY to realize what was going on. Case after case began to open (as I told them would happen if our funds were not released). Due to the fact their management or so called supervisors wouldn't contact us on the matter, we are thinking about sueing for negligence as we lost our online business from their lack of action, and stubborness to not correct the matter.
As a small business owner, and family man that employed his family members, I can tell you I am extremely angry at EBAY for their destructive business practices. I cannot urge you ebay sellers enough to consider alternative online sales portals.
The second business I ran on EBAY was an airplane parts store. We never received a negative. However because I had ran the golf barn, they unlisted all my parts after they received payment for their commissions. Nothing they do makes any **bleep** sense. Remember EBAY down sized and went as automated as possible and the people they did hire are morons. I am sorry to say that, however that has been my experience everytime I spoke with anyone of them (Over 25 people) trying to resolve our issues so that we could maintain our business. However that is not important to them, as I read on yahoo and google, not only are they losing sellers, they have lost a large percentage of buyers. YEAH!
Michael Byers,
