posted on September 8, 2000 07:17:56 AM
Imagine driving up to the mall, finding the parking lot full of cars and thronged with people, and discovering that the doors to the mall entrance were locked ... AGAIN. You see the familiar sign on the door: "This functionality is unavailable. Please try again later." Inside, you can see the storekeepers pacing the floors, their shops stocked, registers at the ready, but not a customer around. They're all locked outside.
The shopkeepers have each paid the mall owners money for the privilege of offering their goods at the mall. The mall closings disrupt business and result in losses for the shopkeepers, whose goods are being held hostage while the mall is closed. Mall management has made vague statements about the closings, which are frequent and sudden, but rarely affords the merchants an adequate offset to compensate them for the negative impact on their sales.
If this were a real-life mall, the merchants would organize a rent strike until the mall owners got serious about fixing the problem. In the online equivalent, many of the sellers are not businesses, but individuals. Consumers. Covered by consumer law. They (we) may have agreed to certain terms and assumptions when we signed on to use the site, but some of those terms may not be legally enforceable. When a company takes money for a service, it provides an implicit warranty of fitness for purpose. As soon as your card was charged a listing fee, a host of federal and state laws kicked in to cover the transaction. Companies don't have the right to establish extralegal jurisdictions and waive laws just because they may find them inconvenient. When a firm arbitrarily, and without the consent of the purchaser, regularly reduces the amount or quality of the service being delivered, the price of the service should be adjusted downward, at the very least. At the very least.
posted on September 8, 2000 07:41:27 AM
How about this; you drive to said mall, doors are locked and they won't give you their phone number so you can complain?
Not so eBay. Give it out in every end of auction notice. That's a damned disgrace. No right to privacy, property or anything else you want to discuss.
I don't have their phone number, why should strangers have mine? The property in my home, the amount of inventory I have, up for grabs, just track the area code and with name already disclosed, there you have the perfect setup for just about anything you care to mention.
How's that to right to privacy? Not to mention the UNfuncional site. Where no one can bid anyway
posted on September 8, 2000 07:49:23 AM
Well it is Friday and eBay does state every week that on Friday mornings the site or most of it is unavailable to us because they are doing maintenance. They have to do it sometime since THIS STORE OR MALL as some of you have put it is OPEN 24 HOURS A DAY, 7 DAYS A WEEK.
Guess if we don't like it we can move our store somewhere else, but you'll run into that there also.
Just like MALLS there has to be downtime for cleaning up and since we all agreed to this when we joined we can't complain and like I said we can take our business somewhere else if we don't like it.
posted on September 8, 2000 07:53:26 AM
Friday is eBay's maintenance day. It's too bad that is spills over into the other 6 days on a regular basis. Then they refuse to issue refunds for the lost revenues.
posted on September 8, 2000 08:04:20 AM
Good analogy.
About telephone numbers....yesterday it was add them to the EOA's. Today on the Announcement Board there is the suggestion that a bidder pull the number and call before they bid.
So I guess eBay doesn't have to worry about having the site up and running since it is encouraging transactions by telephone, from start to finish. What is next? Sellers being required to have 800 numbers?
posted on September 8, 2000 08:38:24 AM
Mall Maintenance is fine, as long as they dont decide to come in MY store and say "Everyone out...put down those packages, walk away from the cash register and LEAVE NOW because we want to sweep up in here for a few hours". NOT!
posted on September 8, 2000 09:25:22 AM
This is the most tired and tiresome premise in auction boards.
Complainers always seem to have lost track of the reality that they have agreed to the conditions that they encounter by their eager signatory action upon application for membership.
The ebay user agreement specifies, in relevant part that:
11.No Warranty.
WE AND OUR SUPPLIERS PROVIDE OUR WEB SITE AND SERVICES "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY. WE AND OUR SUPPLIERS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. Some states do not allow the disclaimer of implied warranties, so the foregoing disclaimer may not apply to you. This warranty gives you specific legal rights and you may also have other legal rights which vary from state to state.
12.Liability Limit.
IN NO EVENT SHALL WE OR OUR SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR LOST PROFITS OR ANY SPECIAL,
INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH OUR SITE, OUR SERVICES OR THIS AGREEMENT (HOWEVER ARISING, INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE).
This is not an instance of a corporation in extralegal jurisdiction, it is a set of standard disclaimers used throughout many environments.
If you are in a state which does not allow such limits on liability, why just pay your filings and take 'em to court. You can argue that you didn't know what you were agreeing to, I suppose.
Failing that somewhat expensive course of action, you can save yourself a whole lot of angst and anxiety by simply turning your back and walking away.
For those who just can't bring themselves to do that, there are certain mollycoddles available in certain conditions, offered up out of the ebay corporate good heart and defined within their outage policy ay http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/png-extn.html, and which, by the way was also greedily agreed to upon entry to the ebay mall.
posted on September 8, 2000 09:25:28 AM
Time for the DOJ to step in...consumer fraud or negligence comes to mind...a contract is two sided folk's. Theft comes to mind..
posted on September 8, 2000 09:43:03 AM
Yikes, functionality my foot!
I listed some items yesterday @ 4 pm EST. They still have not been indexed into search. Maybe they should shoot for 14 day auctions so you have 10 days of exposure?
posted on September 8, 2000 09:46:07 AM
Who ever came up with that word "functionality" anyway? How idiotic is that?
Isn't just "function" okay a word to use?
I guess it was the same idiot who thought up
"telephony" as a word also.
What is is this world coming to?
-
spyke
I found Jesus! - He was behind the sofa the whole time!
posted on September 8, 2000 09:55:14 AM
IIIIIIIIIIIcan do that. AND THE BAND WHINED ON!
Toy, ain't that the truth! And it is happening as we speak.
[ edited by millicent_roberts on Sep 8, 2000 09:56 AM ]
posted on September 8, 2000 10:07:24 AM
"This functionality is not available" does not mean the doors are not open. it means the mall is already full of customers. (The server cannot handle any more requests) -- this is why you can try again after a few seconds wait and it will work.
Yahoo auctions never seem to have this problem....
posted on September 8, 2000 10:12:16 AM"This functionality is not available" does not mean the doors are not open. it means the mall is already full of customers. (The server cannot handle any more requests) -- this is why you can try again after a few seconds wait and it will work.
Kinda makes one wonder why eBay keeps spending time and money on new and expanded "services" instead of ensuring the stability of their infrastructure.
posted on September 8, 2000 10:52:42 AM
True, Yahoo! rarely does have a problem, and do you know who is at Yahoo! trying to fix it at 4AM when they DO have a problem??? The FOUNDERS are there, the guys who BUILT the site and BUILT the technology are there because they KNOW IT INSIDE AND OUT and it doesn't matter that they are personally worth 6 billion dollars and all that, they are there to MAKE IT WORK. And it does... How many times have you gone to anyplace on Yahoo! and had trouble? They are currently getting 625 million hits a day! That's over 10x what ebaY gets!!!!
posted on September 8, 2000 10:53:54 AM
Sorry to say that Yahoo is the one who is not accessible now. I can go anywhere on ebay, but not Yahoo.
Maybe that mall is full too!
But I'll keep trying. Because I can. And I want to!
[ edited by millicent_roberts on Sep 8, 2000 10:55 AM ]
posted on September 8, 2000 03:07:50 PM
Mr. Lister isn't working so I can't list items. EOA emails are coming five days after auction's close. I clicked on a "bid history" link to find a list of bidders and got "functionality not available" error message.
I thought eBay got this fixed. Are we in for several more weeks of downtime and no EOA notices?
posted on September 8, 2000 10:13:29 PM
You're wrong Twinsoft-there's a great reason for it- those bozos are som busy adding more features that don't work that they don't have time to keep the site running.
I wonder if any stockholders actually use the site- it's obvious Ebay management doesn't.
posted on September 9, 2000 09:37:47 AM
>>>"Yahoo! rarely does have a problem"<<<
I'm not too sure about that. There's been several times that I've attempted to list auctions and gave up because I get the "Page cannot be displayed message" over and over again. Not to mention that Yahoo (auctions) regularly crashes my browser (IE) on each of the three different computers I use. I regularly get frustrated with Yahoo "functionality", Ebay "functionality", PayPal "functionaliy" and Auctionwatch "functionality". They all have their share of problems.
posted on September 9, 2000 10:19:50 AMI regularly get frustrated with Yahoo "functionality", Ebay "functionality", PayPal "functionaliy" and Auctionwatch "functionality". They all have their share of problems.
Truer words were never spoken, o feistyone. Not to quibble with those, but here's the difference as I see it: MONEY FOR TIME. Unlike Yahoo, PayPal, and AuctionWatch, we are paying eBay for making our goods available for 3/5/7/10 days. That's 72 hours, 120 hours, 168 hours, or 240 hours (less scheduled maintenance). The listing countdown--eBay's countdown--is in days, hours, and minutes. AFAIC, eBay's disclaimer falls under the "extraordinary events" banner--the old Acts of G-D, war, etc. The unscheduled interruptions in service are NOT explained by eBay as caused by sunspots, floods in CA, specific catastrophic mechanical failure, etc., are they? They are now routine.
The charges for listing fees appear on credit card statements. It certainly seems fair and reasonable to request pro-rata chargebacks of the listing and ancillary fees for time--read "paid service"--not provided. Sound ludicrous? For an empire built on 25-cent listing fees, any threat to the backbone bucks is serious. Methinks a wave of chargebacks would have a much greater attention-getting effect than a handful of plaintive voices in the wind. It certainly seems worth trying. Any disempowered sellers up for it?
posted on September 9, 2000 10:30:33 AM
Chargebacks... hmmm...... very interesting... I LIKE IT!
A few hundred thousand chargeback requests through your credit card would get their attention in a major way, because they would have to respond to every single one individually, and fight every single one individually!
Any seller who pays their fees with a credit card can generate a chargeback. It's best if you can document an exact amount based on downwime, etc... because if you pay for a service, and that service fails to be delivered, they have to credit you back for it. I've received credits from the CableTV company... the newspaper credits you or gives you another paper if your delivery person misses you or it gets rained on or whatever... ebaY USED to give out credits all the time for stuff like this, but now they routinely deny them. Chargebacks are a GREAT idea!!!
posted on September 9, 2000 12:40:46 PM
It's only a very good way to get NARU'd real quick, as anyone who's card has expired or had any card difficulties at billing time can tell you.
Used to be, when feedback was converted to nuetral for recipients of naru'd members those conversions would happen right at invoice charge time like clockwork.
Ebay narus first, then leaves it the user to make their case and hopefully regain registered user status.
So it's a dumb idea unless you intend to deregister anyway.
posted on September 9, 2000 01:06:52 PM
I think krs is laboring under some misapprehensions about what eBay could and would do, given the likely consequences.
I propose that the "venue" be paid for what it delivers, and he suggests that they'll shut you down if you try to make that happen. I submit to you that if eBay tried such a stunt--interference with your exercise of lawful rights in an attempt to avoid being chronically defrauded by them--they'd be subject to multi-state AG investigations and quite possibly FTC scrutiny and action. They'd also guarantee themselves a watershed of bad press of the likes not yet witnessed in the online trading world. The media would eat it up--it'd be the perfect pairing with the FBI's latest fraud figures.
Don't be cowed by krs' scare tactics, folks. Start tracking those disfunctionality stats. It may be their venue, but it's YOUR MONEY.
- Pareau
P.S. Toyranch, glad you like the idea. Ideas are free for the sharing, of course, but you have my blessing to use it in your advocacy efforts. "Charge!Back!"
I LIKE IT!