When does a Big Box store get the 'boot' from eBay?

[iaintdoingit]

During the past few days I have been following a big box eBay store and am shocked – simply shocked. In my opinion, this store 'is' giving eBay and all sellers a horrible name due the lack shipping orders, refunding outside of eBay and 'no' customer service at all.

It appears this company is refunding customers through PayPal outside of the original payment.

This morning the overall feed back was:

Positives = 3,647------

Neutrals = 155                   88.9%

Negatives = 8,931-----

This big box has had a store since September 22, 2016 and have, as of this post, 8,341 items for sale.

A few minutes ago I check to what had transpired since early this morning and the numbers changed again, they are:

Positives = 3,686------

Neutrals = 159                       88.7%

Negatives = 9,151-----

Here are few the negatives:

~Seller is bad and cancellled the order

~Didn’t shipped the item.Paasa

~Item still has not shipped. Invoice paid no shipping info 7 days later

~Not sent and refunded without asking. Contacted seller and they never reply back

~Dissapointed! Item not received, no communication whatsoever!

~Buyer beware: seller never shipped items amd no communication. SCAM

~Bought, waited a week for 3 items to ship, then cancelled without cause.

~I bought item on sale. Seller refunded paypal with no communication. I want item

~Bad seller, should be banned from selling.

~they cancelled and send my payment on paypal even i dont used pypl

~Seller sent refund in PayPal. No message or email through Ebay.

~Did not fulfill order and cancelled though PayPal to avoid eBay NO REFUND GIVEN

~Ebay told me open case after ship date they have no records of any refunds! 🙂

~Canceled order via PayPal, not Ebay. I did NOT request to cancel.

When I first started keeping an eye on this seller the overall FB percentage was 92% which was 4 days ago. It will be interesting to see of eBay does anything.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

[bigdeals.etc]

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@iaintdoingit wrote:

What about all the canceled order -- they "will" hit the sellers metrics.  Will keep check on the 20th for significant changes.

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I think I read one of their negatives saying that they used the "buyer requested to cancel" cancellation excuse. Which is another no no.

[iaintdoingit]

And the clean up has begun!!!!!!!!!

Negatives are going away!  Down from 10,049 to 8,985 in the last few minutes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[nobody*s_perfect]

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@iaintdoingit wrote:

And the clean up has begun!!!!!!!!!

Negatives are going away!  Down from 10,049 to 8,985 in the last few minutes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now 8635

[slippinjimmy]

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@nobody*s_perfect wrote:

If you look at the Sold records for the items that they got negged for, you can see that the selling prices were about 10% of what they should have been.  

So the bit about "overwhelmed" or "didn't know what they were doing" does apply, but it applies to the way they set up the listing (with wrong prices) or their very delayed response in correcting the error. And it also applies to the way they responded -- by canceling the transactions rather than honoring the erroneous prices, which admittedly was a huge number of transactions (more than 9K negs about it so far) due to media publicity about this opportunity.

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Their response may not have been delayed by much, the way the news on these bargain prices spread through affiliates and social media could result in tens of thousands of orders in just a couple of hours. By the time anyone at Adidas found out what was going on it was far to late to avoid a disaster.

As far as who was managing the account, I don't know but I doubt it was eBay directly, there are a number of 3rd parties that handle this type of large corporate accounts, they do it all from the marketing and listing to the fulfillment, it might have been a company suggested or arranged by eBay but not likely handled internally by eBay.

[autopiacarcare]

With the rapid feedback clean up, they are clearly getting help from eBay.  It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that eBay could have also possibly advised and/or assisted with refunding outside of the original payments to avoid defects and automatic account suspension triggers as well.

[slippinjimmy]

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@autopiacarcare wrote:

With the rapid feedback clean up, they are clearly getting help from eBay.  It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that eBay could have also possibly advised and/or assisted with refunding outside of the original payments to avoid defects and automatic account suspension triggers as well.

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No doubt, when a huge seller such as Adidas runs into a problem it's in the best interest of EVERYONE that the mess gets cleaned up as quickly as possible.

As far as the status of the Adidas/Reebok account, metrics don't matter when you are a company doing about 30 BILLION Dollars in annual sales, you get special treatment. Maybe not "fair" but it's the way the world works, always has and always will in a capitalist system.

[ohnojoey]

"When does a Big Box store get the 'boot' from eBay?"

Never?

[lintbrush*]

I may not have the popular opinion but I think cleaning it up is fine.

If you google around, you'll see that this all went down on June 23/24 -with fixing already in progress on the 24th.  The "deals" were posted many places.  People were flocking to buy and in quantity.  Lots of comments about people not even expecting them to honor the deals but they were buying anyway.  They were talking about the cancellations and how they would neg bomb now.

Believe it or not, some of the orders were shipped.

The negs piled up fast to almost 10k.  I'm sure more would've come in.

Even if it were only 10k sales cancelled, at $50 loss each, that's 1/2 million dollars.  

That kind of loss over a technical error that lasted less than a day... to think that the seller should suck it up and eat the mistake is ridiculous.   

I couldn't imagine eBay not handling this for Reebok in an expeditious manner. 

[bigdeals.etc]

I hope eBay accidentally groups my negatives with Reebok's too and removes those as well 🙂

I recall feedback removal departments admitting that feedback removal is VERY STRICT and only done when it absolutely violates policy without a doubt... "because eBay can easily get into lawsuits with the buyer who have a right to leave their opinions."

[twnpopcards]

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@iaintdoingit wrote:

During the past few days I have been following a big box eBay store and am shocked – simply shocked. In my opinion, this store 'is' giving eBay and all sellers a horrible name due the lack shipping orders, refunding outside of eBay and 'no' customer service at all.

It appears this company is refunding customers through PayPal outside of the original payment.

This morning the overall feed back was:

Positives = 3,647------

Neutrals = 155                   88.9%

Negatives = 8,931-----

This big box has had a store since September 22, 2016 and have, as of this post, 8,341 items for sale.

A few minutes ago I check to what had transpired since early this morning and the numbers changed again, they are:

Positives = 3,686------

Neutrals = 159                       88.7%

Negatives = 9,151-----

Here are few the negatives:

~Seller is bad and cancellled the order

~Didn’t shipped the item.Paasa

~Item still has not shipped. Invoice paid no shipping info 7 days later

~Not sent and refunded without asking. Contacted seller and they never reply back

~Dissapointed! Item not received, no communication whatsoever!

~Buyer beware: seller never shipped items amd no communication. SCAM

~Bought, waited a week for 3 items to ship, then cancelled without cause.

~I bought item on sale. Seller refunded paypal with no communication. I want item

~Bad seller, should be banned from selling.

~they cancelled and send my payment on paypal even i dont used pypl

~Seller sent refund in PayPal. No message or email through Ebay.

~Did not fulfill order and cancelled though PayPal to avoid eBay NO REFUND GIVEN

~Ebay told me open case after ship date they have no records of any refunds! 🙂

~Canceled order via PayPal, not Ebay. I did NOT request to cancel.

When I first started keeping an eye on this seller the overall FB percentage was 92% which was 4 days ago. It will be interesting to see of eBay does anything.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

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Here is a link about this issue so you can all read what happened for yourselves and then make up your own minds.  Seems Ebay is once again taking care of a Big Seller who is claiming pricing errors and that its not their fault.  

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2019/6/1561944603.html

[sodelight]

If they're such a Big Box retailer, why would they even need ebay. Most of them have their own websites.

[myjunqueyourtreasure]

Too bad ebay doesn't see fit to help ALL their sellers with such obvious "mistakes".

[sodelight]

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2019/6/1561944603.html

Love the part about how they claim they used promoted listings for the sales LIFT! Like that company is even paying ebay's 9.15% fvf rate, let alone an additional percentage. I don't think so. If they were paying the same rate as us 'commoners', they wouldn't have received special treatment in relation to feedback removal. They'd have gotten the "unfortunately, that's ebay policy and there's nothing we can do" spin and fallen into ebay's 5% extra fvf club!

There's no excuse for an alleged "glitch' to have taken so long to correct or to happen at all!

[trukur_0]

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@nobody*s_perfect wrote:

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@iaintdoingit wrote:

And the clean up has begun!!!!!!!!!

Negatives are going away!  Down from 10,049 to 8,985 in the last few minutes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now 8635

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Oooo the minimum wage big box store employee has been given the monumental task to call and have the CS revise every single last neg!!! Can you imagine these two going back and forth?

oh emm geee...

Ok so we're on neg number 9,452 blablabla...etc, etc, ok will there be anything else we can help you with today?

mhm yes there's a neg #9,451 I'd like to speak about next, oh so pretty pls...

oh emmm gee...

[autopiacarcare]

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@slippinjimmy wrote:

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No doubt, when a huge seller such as Adidas runs into a problem it's in the best interest of EVERYONE that the mess gets cleaned up as quickly as possible.

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To be clear, I was just throwing out ideas on what I thought was going on, not passing judgement either way.

I agree that eBay pretty much had to do something to help them.  Allowing an account that big to go under would not be good. I'm sure with the size of both companies involved here, there were many conversations with legal departments involved trying to sort out the best way forward.

As sellers, I think we can all also appreciate eBay not feeding the trolls that tried to take advantage of the situation and then formed an internet mob to try to bring the brand down when it didn't work out.  The brand and eBay are both already going to suffer some serious PR consequences from this, no need to throw fuel on that fire.

That being said, it sounds like there was little to no communication with a lot of the buyers affected and while refunds outside of the original transaction may have been the best course for the brand and eBay, it seems to have added more confusion and frustration for many of the buyers. That could have a negative impact on the marketplace as a whole, which hurts all of us.

eBay couldn't really just sit by and do nothing, but any action to help the brand risks alienating buyers and other sellers who might feel it is unfair.  I think it's a tough situation and there isn't a perfect solution that could clear it up without any negative consequences.  It will be interesting to see what the fallout is and where things go from here.