James Simmons / January 19th, 2010 at 3:35 pm

The sellers may be performing better customer service, but I have noticed in the past few days, that eBay’s own help paths have gotten MUCH more complicated. If you MUST contact eBay personnel directly, such as to report errors in eBay’s own systems, there is no definitive link at the bottom of the page for that. You have to navigate through many, many pages of canned help, and even then, you may never find the email us link. The question arises as to whether the emails ever even are read by a human being, because they have a disclaimer saying that they cannot give their customers individual attention. That is not customer service, in my book.

Users may have noticed that in at least the past few days, the message service on eBay does not capture the emails you send to sellers anymore, and vice-versa. Has anyone been able to report this failure in eBay’s systems? If so, has a human read the report, and have the programmers looked at the problem? There is absolutely no way to know.

Anyone else out there missing that “warm and fuzzy” feeling about making contact with eBay customer service personnel?

Mary Elston / January 22nd, 2010 at 11:03 am

James Simmons, I feel your pain. Although I LOVE eBay, and have found the sellers I’ve worked w/to be exceptional, I’ve just experienced my first problem w/a seller, and the inability to access a human is frustrating. Not everything neatly fits into generic FAQS or five or six limited choices on a pulldown menu. To their credit, the ebay response time has been swift and courteous; however canned. Bravo, I was issued a postage paid label to return the item to the seller, but…to an invalid address (Boo)!! If I had been able to speak w/someone this minor issue would already be solved, and I would have my money back. Sorry, it may be better than most, but customer service still has a way to go! I was a csrep all through school, I know the drill.

Mike / September 13th, 2010 at 4:14 pm

With all due respect:

I just spent over an hour on eBay Chat hold waiting for an eBay rep., and then over another hour in chat with the rep., with regard to a simple issue (to make sure that my eBay shipping address now showed as confirmed, my having taken the necessary steps for it to do so last week). The rep. often ignored what I was saying, often took more than 5 minutes to respond to me, provided imprecise instructions (that didn’t match info. at the eBay site), and did things to my account without my permission.

I am very sorry, but: a solid “F” in terms of customer support, that eBay (obviously) needs to work on–assumming that it cares about its customers.