“Early this morning, we made a change to our site that caused some links to PayPal from Web sites such as eBay, merchant sites, blogs, forums, and others to be broken. Though you may receive an error message instead of the intended PayPal page, this does not in any way affect your ability to send and receive payments. You can still use PayPal to pay on eBay and at millions of merchant sites around the world.

As a merchant or owner of another site that links to PayPal, there is nothing that you need to change on your site to resolve this issue. Rest assured that my team has all hands on deck to resolve this matter. We expect the bug to be fixed later today.”

Yes, I know it’s not good news and yes, I realize it is highlighting a technical glitch rather than an accomplishment but the fact that the issue was proactively blogged about from within is fairly significant. Most companies, eBay Inc. included, will prepare one-two sentence positioning statements in instances like this and reactively provide them to media when – and only when – prompted to do so. As a result, you’ll see online influencers / bloggers fielding user comments and calls complaining of a glitch that will in most cases result in speculative posts that contain inaccuracies and perpetuate uncertainty and doubt – all because the only official word from the company is a one sentence statement filled with generalities and vagueness (not to mention the gasoline fire that Twitter can represent in instances like this).

All of this is negated with one word – transparency. PayPal identified a problem, communicated it publicly, and got back to trying to fix it as quickly and as seamlessly as possible.

I read something that touched on this just last week in response to Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and his continued frank and honest public discussion on Twitter and on his blog. The post, focused on communicating lay-offs through corporate blogs, Finding a Human Voice through Social Media, attests that “executives personally sharing bad news is not only more heartfelt than canned press releases, but also keeps away rumor mongers and controls backlash. In practical terms, speaking out about cuts before the media can weigh in allows a company to simply get in front of what’s obviously a sensitive topic.”

Baby Steps. That’s all it is. But as someone who is all too familiar with them at home right now, it’s nice to see them taking place at the workplace too.

Cheers,
RBH

As some people had pointed out here on Ink and on other message boards and blogs, there was a break-down in Best Match over the weekend that directly effected some sellers over the past few days. The problem has since been addressed and fixed but it doesn’t take away from the fact that a number of individual’s sales were impacted as a result. Jeff King addressed the problem on The Chatter this afternoon.

“We had a very unusual software bug that we unfortunately didn’t catch during our testing process. Essentially, it caused Best Match to sometimes sort items incorrectly over roughly the past 3 days, which is why the member mentioned in this post saw what they did. The members who did see these strange results were able to fix it by refreshing, but of course that’s not an acceptable solution to either us or them. We had teams working 24 by 7 to get this fixed as soon as we discovered it.”

He went on to say…

“We of course don’t want things like this to happen, and we apologize to all the members who saw this strange Best Match sort order. We’ve already changed our testing process to make sure that this won’t occur again.”

The full post can be found here.

Cheers,
RBH