On October 26th I got an update from eBay asking me to update my seller information, specifically my email and telephone number. They have not changed in the 17 years that I've sold on this platform so I verified them and the screen said DONE. No problem right? WRONG
The next day I got a nasty ACTION NEEDED message that stated:
We recently asked you to review and update some details on your eBay account. Looks like you haven't made any updates yet. Your payouts will be on hold until you fix this. Please do this by 2023-01-24 to get your account back in good standing.
I called in and was told that I was fine, it just might take time for the system to verify things since they were sending the message out to many sellers. Each day I had a nasty pink banner telling me to update my information and on November 4th I got the threatening message again. I called in, got routed through 3 people into Europe somewhere and was told that I was fine. This time I made one of them actually send me a message in eBay verifying that fact:
Thank you so much for reaching out to us for the account information inquiry, you needn't worry about any update to the information since it is currently undergoing said verification with no issues at all.
The payouts are active and eligible to be sent to the bank account on file.
Problem solved, right? WRONG!
The daily pink messages kept coming and the threatening ACTION NEEDED message came again this afternoon. Another phone call and another routing to Europe, to the UK this time. A very nice young lady put up with my by this time very angry response to this continued threat to not pay me what I had earned.
We went through everything step by step and I found to my horror that since my phone number was a landline they could not verify it by sending a text message to it. I literally had to change my primary number to my wife's cell phone number in order to get my information verified. And even that was not good enough at first because they sent a verification code to my email address which when I put it in was not enough for the system to verify me. Only when they sent a second verification code to my wife's cell phone was I able to be verified and hopefully off the pink threat list!
Which leads to the following questions:
1. Why did it take 3 weeks and 6 phone calls for someone to tell me that I needed text capability in order to continue to sell on eBay?
2. Is that even legal? Since a larger proportion of older adults in the US may not have text capability like yours truly (maybe I'll change my screen name to Dinosaur1 or something) is that not age discrimination?
3. Why is this second layer of verification so important? Even the patient lady said that I could request a call back from eBay on my landline if I needed it and that it was more necessary in Europe than in the US to have this type of verification.
4. Why does Ebay continue to make simple things hard? Instead of sending threatening emails couldn't they simply have sent one saying they needed to be able to send me a text in order to verify my account information?
5. Am I the only dinosaur left or is anyone else in this predicament? If you are getting these messages and don't know how to deal with them you simply need to find someone with a cell phone to help you out.
All this angst because I was perfectly happy using the same phone number since 1987 and not thinking that the world has a right to track my every move through a cell phone!
