My husband manages an ebay account that he uses for his small business and on behalf of our family. (I’m posting from my own, separate account.) He's been a buyer/seller for at least a decade. He's a systems integrator and routinely sources hard-to-find replacement parts for his customers via ebay. He nurtures his rep carefully, has had 271 transactions, and 100% satisfaction rating. He very recently has his posted-item limit increased.
His account just got suspended, permanently, while he was trying to complete the managed payment transition and connect a bank account to his ebay account. He was attempting to comply with the paperwork upload requirements. After his uploaded bank statement failed verification for a second time, he DID NOT get any message or email from ebay that he was suspended. Rather, the next time he tried to use his account, he found he was marked as "no longer a registered user".
He contacted tech support and via chat was informed that "Your account was suspended due to concerns with the documents that was [sic] sent for verification. After further review of your account we have decided that your account will remain suspended. . . . we cannot provide you with specific information." A bit later in the chat, "there is no further opportunity for appeal on this decision."
I’m reasonably sure I know why the bank statement from our joint account failed verification. He wasn’t doing a good job of reading the fine print about how names have to match exactly. When I went through the same process a few months ago for my own ebay account, I ended up opening a separate no-fee checking account in my own name simply so the names could all match.
What makes no sense to me is that a second attempt to upload one document for the (complicated!) managed payment transition would cause an automatic, unappealable suspension. My guess is that it is possibly a bit more complicated: the second attempt may have triggered some sort of deep-dive AI account review process that went wrong.
This is a big problem for his small business, an annoyance for our family, and, I would contend, is likely the tip of an iceberg-algorithm problem for ebay. I believe there are a lot of individual sellers out there to whom this is happening. Each of them is assuming this is a personal problem and is outraged and, possibly, ashamed. In the meantime, ebay is banishing-for-life at least a small cadre of reputable sellers simply because they are having trouble completing an annoying and complicated account transition that ebay itself is insisting they go through.
Oddly, I just got done watching one of Cathy O’Neil’s good Weapons of Math Destruction videos. That our account was suspended without warning, without (clear) explanation, and with no venue for appeal makes it a textbook case of an algorithm gone wrong.
In addition to two chat sessions with live people that ended with the “no appeal” statement above, we’ve tried repeatedly to access the “have us call you back option” but it has not been available any time I’ve been online.
What should we do next?
