Monday, July 10, 2006

EBay.co.uk - Real and Ongoing Difficulties

I have spent the last fortnight getting more and more frustrated with eBay.co.uk. I used to use eBay fairly regularly, buying plants, secondhand books and (new) yarns for crochet. My feedback from that time was 100% and I received comments like "Prompt payment, smooth transaction. Recommended.", "Excellent ebayer, fast payment , thank you A+++++" and "great buyer, quick payment, many thanks".

Anyway, for no particular reason I just didn't have cause to use eBay.co.uk from last October until now, so I never tried to log in. Now, of course, I am a member of the Red Hat Society and need to wear Red Hats and, guess what? Buying a new hat is expensive! So I want to buy some which have been only worn once and now, while the wedding season continues, is the time to look out for them. But eBay won't let me log in under my existing User name at all. After a while I gave up and tried to Register under a new User Name. No success either as I just didn't receive the necessary e-mail from them. Emails that I send to eBay.co.uk bounce too. So over a week I posted no less than three separate e-mails to their Customer Support website but have received no answer to any of them. I had a long and expensive telephone call to a gentleman in India who is one of my own ISP's Technical Support Services: he tested everything and finally confirmed what I had already suspected: my e-mail is working perfectly but for some reason any e-mail I send to eBay.co.uk is bouncing and presumably visa versa and I was told that the problem is clearly at eBay.co.uk's end NOT mine. So I've made two more comments to this effect to their Customer Support - no answer to either of them.

After contacting them five times and each one being ignored I have to admit that I am rapidly losing impatience in eBay and my advice to one and all is: DO NOT USE EBAY.CO.UK!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm delighted to learn that you've joined the Red Hat Society! We have SO much in common, and now this is one more thing.

I can't imagine how eBay.uk can continue to exist if they cannot receive or return e-mails. How frustrating it must have been to try to connect to them without any response. Has the situation improved since you posted?

If you can, I'd love to see what your summer red hat looks like. I need to shop for a fall/winter version. I have a very lightweight Liz Claiborne hat for summer, and hardly ever get to wear it.

Buffy 8-1-06

Adele said...

Buffy,

So far I have been to just one event as a member of the RHS, it appears that this Chapter has on average two events a month and, of course, at the moment it's the summer holiday period when clubs, etc close down. However there are going to be things on in September that I have already said I'll go to.

I now have two red hats. One I bought for full price (about £20) from the Department store Debenhams. The other I bought from eBay for only £6. EBay is a good place to buy from because now is the time that all the wedding hats, that have only been worn once for a few hours, are posted.

Yes, as you can tell I am using eBay.co.uk. Basically after I got over my exasperation with the company I began to think laterally and remembered that I had an old Hotmail account I hadn't used for years. So I exumed it, Registered without any trouble and bought a at online. What I'll try to do is to get someone to take some pictures of me wearing the hats, so you can see what they, and I, look like in them.