posted on February 18, 2001 04:19:13 PM new
I submited a credit request for my auctions that ended on the 16th after eBay kept crashing. I submitted info to eBay from their own Outage Policy and was told I would get no credit.
Ebay also removed all but one of the System Status Updates from the Announcement board.
On the night of the 16th, as I'm sure you all know, ebay was crashing left and right. Search was not working, Seller pages were not working and the rest of the site was not working either. This is the reply I received:
"Hello,
I am glad that you wrote in so that I can address this issue. I will be
more than happy to try and resolve this situation for you.
I am sorry but we are only issuing credit for the site outage, 18:29 PST
to 18:56 PST. We are not issue credit for the bid history, seller search
and my eBay being down, because the title search was functional.
Again, please accept my apology for this situation and the inconvenience
that it has caused.
Regards,
Brian W. G.
eBay Billing Support"
and this is their Outage Policy:
"Outage Policy
Our highest priority is your trading success. However, eBay occasionally experiences outages during which bidders cannot place bids or cannot effectively locate items via our Title Search function. When these outages occur, we offer this Outage Policy to compensate for your inconvenience.
Title Search Outage of 1 or more hours:
eBay automatically credits all associated fees for affected listings.
The following listings will be eligible for credit:
Any listing scheduled to end during the outage
Any listing scheduled to end in the hour after the end of the outage
Unlike our policy for Hard Outages of two hours or more, listings will not be extended
Hard Outage of more than 1 hour but less than 2 hours:
eBay automatically credits all associated fees for affected listings
The following listings will be eligible for credit:
Any listing scheduled to end during the outage
Any listing scheduled to end in the hour after the end of the outage
Additionally, credit will be issued for the 10-cent promotional fee on any 10-day listing that is running during the outage (regardless of the time it's scheduled to end)
Includes either of the following features:
View Item
Bidding
Unlike our policy for Hard Outages of two hours or more, listings will not be extended
Hard Outage of two hours or more:
eBay automatically extends listings for 24 hours
eBay automatically credits all associated fees for affected listings.
The following listings will be eligible for extension and credit:
Any listing scheduled to end during the outage
Any listing scheduled to end in the hour after the end of the outage
Additionally, credit will be issued for the 10-cent promotional fee on any 10-day listing that is running during the outage (regardless of the time it's scheduled to end)
Includes either one or all of the following features:
View Item
Bidding
What do we consider to be a Hard Outage?
A hard outage occurs when no one can bid (specifically View Item pages are inaccessible and/or bidding functionality is not available) as a result of unscheduled system downtime. At our discretion, eBay may consider two outages that occur very closely to one another to be one hard outage when extending listings.
Listings that end prior to an outage will not be extended.
What do we consider to be a Title Search Outage?
A Title Search outage occurs when items are not accessible via Title Search as a result of unscheduled system downtime.
During an Outage
Updates will be posted on the Announcements Board during an outage. Please check there for details about the outage and possible listing extensions.
When Listings are Extended
Following a hard outage of two or more hours, eBay will extend the end times for all eligible listings by 24 hours. This activity prevents bidding on these listings while the end times are being reset. After the listing end times have been reset, eBay updates search and listing indexes. Until these index updates are completed, these listings will be unavailable via Search or Listings. This re-indexing can take a few hours.
To End Your Listing
eBay offers the Outage Policy as a courtesy. However, you may be satisfied with the bidding activity before the extended listing end time. If you are, you may end your listing at any time at:
SCHEDULED DOWNTIME
eBay periodically schedules system downtime for maintenance and other purposes. This scheduled downtime is not covered by this policy. Listings that end during, or are otherwise affected by, scheduled downtime will not be extended nor will credits be issued, even though bidders are not able to place bids at the close of the listing."
Looks like eBay will do just about anything to keep our money in their pockets.
Did anyone whose auctions ended on the 16th get the fees credited?
posted on February 18, 2001 04:22:48 PM new
Keep sending the email to ebay until someone says they will credit you. Don't hit the "reply" button - just keep sending a brand new email to them every time.
When you don't get the answer you want from ebay, keep emailing them - most likely, eventually you WILL get the answer you are looking for.
I did not request payment for the 16th but I have requested credit for times when I had auctions ending and ebay was down. They have never given me a problem about crediting me. But I have had other problems that they wouldn't do anything about - until I emailed them over and over until I finally got what I needed from them.
posted on February 18, 2001 05:11:12 PM new
Absolutely keep requesting your refunds. Every time you send a request,a different person gets it, and they all have different definitions of what is or isn't eligible for refunds. If you get very frustrated and know a lawyer, have your lawyer send a refund request based on failure to provide a service you paid for. You can also request your charge card company not pay the fees you feel are owed you. Finally you can file a complaint with the FTC for consumer fraud at http://www.ftc.gov -Rosalinda
TAGnotes - daily email synopsis about the Online Auction Industry http://www.topica.com/lists/tagnotes
posted on February 18, 2001 05:21:02 PM new
By the way - the ebaY OUTAGE info for 16 Feb from TAGnotes Issue #284 -
"ebaY conducted scheduled maintenance on Fri 16 Feb from 01:00 PT to 03:00 PT. The site then developed intermittent problems that lasted all day. Users reported Billpoint down on 16 Feb at 10:56:33 PT. At 12:08:15 PT users reported a short outage that lasted until 12:10:34 PT. Problems with search, seller search and completed auctions continued until approx 12:31:17 PT. At 18:40:04 PT ebaY reported their site down.
At 19:14:44 PT ebaY reported that the site went down at 18:29 PT due to a hardware failure on their primary database. They reported the site back up at 18:56 PT, but at 19:42:55 PT added that My ebaY was not
working and that seller search results and bid history information from the individual auction pages was not working. Users reported the site back up at 20:38:56 PT and seller search and My ebaY back up at 21:19.
ebaY posted at 22:42:07 PT, that they had to take the site down for emergency maintenance from 23:00 PT to 23:30 PT. They brought the site back up at 23:15:16." - Rosalinda
posted on February 19, 2001 04:14:43 PM new
Thats funny!!!! I also requested refunds and this was their reply to me. (note the different outage time )
Hello xxx,
Thank you for writing to us about your listings. I'm sorry to hear that
our brief problems affected your items.
After reviewing our Announcements Board, I show that items that ended
between 12:06 - 12:28 PST and 18:30 - 18:56 PST can be credited. I show
that all of your items ended after these times. At this time, I will be
unable to credit your account for any fees related to the items you sent
in, as they ended after the site problems were fixed.
Again, thank you for writing in ???, and have a great day!
Regards,
Morgan
eBay Billing Support
______________________________
eBay
Your Personal Trading Community (tm)
