Red Ink Diary

eBay’s Lorrie Norrington recently announced that as part of a move to achieve complete control of the the entire payment and communication process on eBay “checks and money orders will no longer be accepted on eBay”. To clarify that statement, she meant sellers will no longer be permitted to accept checks and money orders, not that eBay will no longer accept checks or money orders.

eBay will require approval of merchant CC payment processing services, and all payment methods are to be fully integrated into eBay checkout. For large sellers who utilize ChannelAdvisor or a similar service this will not cause problems. The small seller who would not qualify on volume for CA has few choices; PayPal, ProPay, try to integrate by yourself or quit. Judging by the recent registrations at Bonanzle hundreds have seen the writing on the wall and are moving on.

eBay will become a de facto PayPal monopoly in the USA.

What is wrong with PayPal only on eBay?

PayPal’s ‘User Agreement’

Users of PayPal’s services are required to accept the terms of a contractual ‘user agreement’, which is posted on the PayPal website. Many of the terms of this ‘user agreement’ are potentially misleading, unconscionable, unfair, or unenforceable. Some specific criticisms of the PayPal ‘user agreement’ include:

• Permit PayPal but not the user to avoid or limit performance of the contract;
• Penalize the user but not PayPal for a breach or termination of the contract;
• Permit PayPal but not the user to vary the terms of the contract;
• Permit PayPal unilaterally to vary the characteristics of the services supplied to the user;
• Limit PayPal’s vicarious liability for its agents; and;
• Limit the user’s right to sue PayPal.

In summary

On the whole, eBay appears to be arguing that:
• eBay’s customers, the sellers are incapable of choosing the ‘best’ payment option, according to eBay’s definition of what the ‘best’ option is;
• For those customers’ own good, eBay must force them to use the ‘best’ payment option;
• It is impliedly irrelevant to eBay’s decision-making that the ‘best’ payment option is provided by a wholly-owned subsidiary of eBay, and will result in a significant financial benefit to eBay.

eBay’s argument is condescending and paternalistic at best, and ignores the fact that eBay users are capable of making rational choices about what they view the best payment method to be. Until recently eBay banned Google checkout on the site by categorizing it with ‘unsafe and unproven’ Payment Services not permitted on eBay. The wording recently changed

Safety and convenience are at the core of eBay’s policies toward payments. This policy is designed to promote safe online shopping, and to encourage online payment methods that are safer, easier to use, and offer high levels of protection for users

This all sounds noble and altruistic. Unfortunately an eBay executive made the following statement on eBayINKblog, the official eBay blog,
finally a truthful and unequivocal statement of the fact we suspected all along.

Well for goodness sakes!

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Links to topical articles:

The Brews News

The big push on eBay this year is to promote buyer confidence, and it is hard to find fault with that. Unfortunately eBay has chosen to accomplish this goal by heavily publicizing the need to protect innocent buyers from the bad sellers. Predictably this has decreased buyer confidence; after all eBay is constantly telling them it is full of fraud, fakes, crooks and scammers. eBay has fostered adversarial attitudes all round.

eBay’s message is that all sellers are bad, some are more bad than others. eBay despises small sellers. Big is best. Small sellers need to be regulated and controlled, big sellers get all the goodies, if they can. Keep that big juicy carrot dangling just out of reach. If small sellers want carrots they need to grow, put more fees in the coffers. This contentious and contemptuous attitude has trickled down from the top echelons of management to pervade the entire corporate structure.

There is no gray on eBay today, eBay is strictly black and white. This is shown very clearly by the Freudian slip in Brain Burke’s decision to count neutral feedback as a negative.

There are no bad buyers, eBay’s president Lorrie Norrington is so confident of this that she explained step by step how to work the system so no crooked buyer need pay a seller for items received. Not satisfied by this she then stated that ‘we’ need all the buyers even the bad ones.

All this enthusiastic but clueless proselytization has caused some major problems for eBay today, lack of seller confidence and active seller distrust.Sellers have learned to look for the hidden agenda which is often expressed more loudly by what eBay does not say than by the words which are spoken, or written. I doubt very many sellers look on eBay as a partner anymore, an adversarial and domineering partnership is a guarantee for failure. eBay is more like a bad landlord or the fairytale farmer who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs for short term profit.

Successful sellers are not stupid people. Stupid gets weeded out fairly rapidly in a natural selection process. eBay has either forgotten this basic truth or has chosen to ignore it in the hope that as old sellers leave there will always be new ones coming in the door. To a point this is true, but the new sellers will also find the conditions inimical to profitable trading and they too will leave, for the same reasons the old ones did. As outgo exceeds inflow eBay will have an entirely different set of problems.

Sellers do not want to hear the phrase “we hear you” from eBay executives again, we know you may hear us, but you are not listening. eBay must recognize the need to respect and work with the sellers because we all want the same thing, sales and happy customers. If we can’t get IT on eBay we will remake our business plans because life is too short to waste in war with our venue.

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Dear Ms Norrington

As a woman I was very pleased to hear that you are moving up in the corporate ranks again. Sincere congratulations on your promotion. eBay has a history of being an equal opportunity employer and I am sure that you have worked very hard to earn your place in the sun, however, as you know, all is not well at eBay. As a woman I would hate to see another woman in the role of fall guy.

You have made a choice to live in the corporate world, with a regular salary and structured benefits. You have paid and will continue to pay a price for this choice, but it is your choice. Both large and small eBay sellers, who made eBay what it is today as sellers and buyers, are not like you in that respect; they are entrepreneurs, gamblers if you like, and probably not good employee material.

Those of us who are categorized as ‘noise’ by your PR department and ‘flea market’ by your boss John Donohoe, are unhappy with the ‘New eBay’. Many left in May with lots of noise and others have just been quietly closing their doors and melting away in the succeeding months.

I know that eBay’s focus this year has been on the buyer experience. I would respectfully remind you that we who sell on eBay are eBay’s buyers. We are your buyers and the good people who buy our products are our customers.

eBay is loosing good sellers like water through a colander.

Do you know that as of yesterday 21% of the top 100,000 eBay sellers are inactive? Or that there was a 15% increase in the number of inactive registered sellers in that tranche alone in the last month?

This blog post from Scott Pooler explains one important reason why your seller base is suffering such enormous shrinkage. Customer Service. Is it possible that there is an element of “Do as I say, not as I do” at eBay today? Your customers at Cornerstone Supply have grounds to believe that. Sue at Tamebay, who is as pro-eBay as it is possible to be has a similar case.

Here is a blog post from one of your remaining good sellers. A pro eBay multiple account PowerSeller who because of the PS status is able to talk to a live person at eBay. The last two paragraphs indicate a poor prognosis in this case. Can you imagine the frustration of a small seller trying to deal with unwanted bidders, listing glitches and non-relevant bot driven customer service?

My judgement of you Ms Norrington is that you are a genuine person who honestly does not understand why your customers are so negative and depressed about changes that you believe are for our own good.

A large part of the blame can be directly attributed to your PR department who are arrogant, rude and dismissive. The ‘noise’ and ‘routed off the site’ comments will still be resonating long after Mr Lieberman has moved on. In Australia it would be safe to say Simon Smith is despised, moving him would solve a lot of problems in that country. Your T&S chief in the UK, Richard Ambrose has earned the reputation (in less than a year) of being a vindictive and arrogant micromanaging cruiser of the discussion boards who is openly contemptuous of sellers. This attitude is increasingly prevalent among your employees towards your customers and it is not helping.

Your customers have been deluged by too many ineptly implemented changes in too short a period of time. We are told that even more changes will be implemented ‘before the holidays’. This may be enough to drive even more sellers to a platform where they can concentrate on selling during the busiest time of the year. I am directly quoting one of the top eBay sellers here, “One thing I would ask eBay, is to please stop making nonsensical changes in the 4th quarter…from September through December… Please try to stay out of 4th quarter changes this year!”

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First we asked questions. Sometimes we got answers. Sometimes we got different contradictory answers. Most of the answers we got were of the take it or leave it variety.

Next we tried reason, we explained. We told them why the proposed changes would not work. We gave examples and pointed out contradictions in wording. This had about as much effect as pouring water down a well.

Thousands signed petitions, it made them feel better. I will not sign petitions, I think they are pretty much useless but mainly I object to the word petition. (a request made for something desired, esp. a respectful or humble request, as to a superior or to one of those in authority; a supplication or prayer:)

I ain’t no supplicant; I AM A CUSTOMER!

We did get some response, Lorrie Norrington said “I think it’s a great point of learning for us.” So comforting, when they are ‘learning’ at the expense of your livelihood and reputation.

Some of us boycotted, and publicized the fact vigorously. No selling and just as importantly no buying. This led to a lot of less than desirable media attention for eBay, giving the PR department opportunity to be condescending and dismissive about their customers. Some executives stuck their feet in their mouths, Simon Smith with the heroin remark comes to mind. This must have made a good impression on the general public. Some corporate lame-brain opined that there was no noticeable effect from the boycott because there were no demonstrators at eBay’s San Jose campus.

Some of us quietly stopped using eBay and moved to alternative, less hostile venues.

So here we are, six weeks down the boycott road and ‘Where y’at?’ as they say in N’awlins. It is now time to ramp it up. What do you think?

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