Sellers need to keep calling and complaining/giving eBay strong push back on this. The reason I spend two hours on the phone is after I got representative #3 on the phone at the 10 minute mark I was speaking to her for more than 40 minutes, she was taking serious notes and I was giving her a lot to write about.
Fortunately she was at the level where she attends regular meetings where they discuss all of the issues we sellers have been angry about the last few months.
The same with representative #4, spoke with him for close to 40 minutes as well explaining the back to back wrongful suspensions we had six weeks ago, the active content where the phantom Java (that did not exist) was flagging all of our listings and cost us nearly 60 man hours to get straightened out between 7 phone calls to eBay and then using third party software combined with eBay's to get it stopped.
I continued about the listings meeting Goggles new criteria and why is it that we sellers have to do all this work isn't that what we pay eBay for? Don't we pay them for the use of their selling platform where all we are supposed to do is fill in the blanks, upload some pictures and slap a price on it.
I spent that time on the phone and we need thousands more to do the same or nothing will change.
I did not threaten eBay, nor ask for anything but was given a 90 day free credit on our eBay store that is nearly $300.00 a month because they understand the frustration we are feeling.
I told them I don't want to leave but can't do this much longer. Our company has been in business for nearly 40 years, has had its ups and downs and there are only two of us doing eBay sales and I am the companies GM and have many other responsibilities and don't have the time to keep up with all this **bleep** and get more listings up at the same time.
Reasons I don't want to leave eBay are Search Engine Optimization or as I call it manipulation. Nobody is better than eBay at that. We list items at 4:30 in the afternoon and the next morning by 10:00 a.m. they are #1 or #2 on Google search.
Nobody else can do that. We pay a company several hundred dollars a month to do that for our website and they are very good and still it can take weeks, even months for a newly arrived part to show up on the first page of Google results.
I told them I'm not trying to get around eBay and wouldn't care if I paid them $5000.00 a month in fees that would only mean that my sales are $50,000 a month.
The main point I made was they thing they are going to make more money by cracking down on the SMALL % of people intentionally taking sales outside of eBay by using a scorched earth policy to make us ALL PAY that they are going to lose way more money as sellers leave and seek alternate market places to sell their merchandise.
