eBay Messages : it’s bad to talk
by Sue Bailey
I’ve been having a conversation with a chum recently via eBay Messages. We’ve sent a couple of emails each over the last fortnight or so, and last night I tried to respond to his most recent message. This is what I got back from eBay:
Attention!
We have determined you are trying to contact an eBay member with whom you are not currently involved in an open transaction. For the protection of the eBay community, we sometimes block these types of communication. To prevent this occurrence from happening in the future, we recommend the following:
* If you are a seller, respond to all bidder questions before the auction ends.
* If you are trying to contact the seller of an item that has not yet ended go to the item page and click the “Ask seller a question” link.
* If you are the winning buyer of an item go to your My eBay page under the items I’ve Won section. Click the action drop down menu and choose the “contact seller” action.
* If you are a seller trying to contact your winning buyer, go to My eBay and under the Items I’ve Sold section, click the action drop down menu. Choose the “contact buyer” action.
* Reply to seller/bidder through personal email provider (if the sender has not hidden their email address).
Thank you for your understanding.
Thinking that maybe the problem was that I was rather late in responding to the messages thread, I tried to contact him directly using “contact member”: same message.
On eBay, and with ecommerce in general, I’ve always taken the view that you should make communication as easy as possible. It’s scary for buyers, sending off money to people they don’t know for stuff they might not ever get. One of the ways to overcome that – one of the ways that eBay helped to overcome those first ecommerce hurdles, back in the late 90s – is to make communication easy. Check that there’s a human being at the other end, we’d advise nervous newbies; ask a question, any question, just to see what kind of response you get.
It looks like eBay want to stop that now. Transactional communication is, it seems, the new order of the day. Use “contact seller/buyer” from your completed items page: don’t talk until you’ve bought. Or use Ask Seller a Question from an item page: I wonder if extended message threads get curtailed from there too? It’s all just one more way in which eBay are moving to own the transaction, and I don’t like it.
No doubt eBay will have reasons for this message: it’s to protect buyers from fraudsters, it’s to stop fee avoidance. With Reply to seller/bidder through personal email provider (if the sender has not hidden their email address), they practically admit the inconvenience: get your conversation off our Messages as soon as possible!
We know the arguments, and I agree, preventing fraud is important to me, and stopping fee avoidance is important to eBay. But. In the middle of a conversation is not the place to do those things. Buyer education should be done way, WAY before buyers are in a position to talk to people who might be ripping them off (I’d suggest that two powersellers with combined feedback of 150,000 aren’t likely to be ripping each other off either). And when there’s a trade-off between allowing communication and preventing fee avoidance – communication should always win. Restricting your trading platform because you’re so terrified you might lose a quid or two in fees is just ridiculous: those of us who want to avoid eBay fees have already packed up and left 
12 Responses on "eBay Messages : it’s bad to talk"
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Actually the folk wanting to avoid ebay fees stay well away from ebay communication channels.
A certain Alexander Graham Bell is to blame I think
Yup, I’ve had the same. What’s also frustrating is when you answer a question, then try to send further information by clicking on ‘reply’ again, and it won’t let you because you’ve already replied.
An example – if a potential buyer sends a message asking ‘have you got more of this item?’, I reply saying I haven’t but I will let them know if and when I do. When I get more stock, I can’t reply because I’ve already replied.
Yes I know there’s ways round it, but it’s frustrating and not exactly easy.
I’ve had one of those eBay messages. I think its terrible. Talk about a police state. What happened to democracy and freedom of speech.
I could not agree more, Sue!
The one that really drives me absolutely crazy is that ebay have now prevented you from just replying to the message it generates when a buyer wants to let you know they are paying by cheque, PO or bank transfer.
I always used to just reply with ‘thanks for letting me know I will keep an eye out for it” and I almost always got a quick reply from the buyer thanking me for bothering to acknowledge it.
It feels so rude not to answer! So ebay 2.0 in fact.
Maybe this is why skype was not fully integrated. Its a shame really, as good customer service requires quality tools
There was definitely a good opportunity for eBay and Skype to work together on this one at one time..
A sadly missed opportunity if you ask me
Chris,
eBay might have stuck with Skype when their model was insertion fee based.
That they have not kept Skype is a reflection of the ‘current’ final value fee based model.
Next year who knows?
We might go around again quite soon!
PS Listing quality would undoubtedly be improved by an insertion fee based model.
I think the reason may be partly due to some of the new large companies selling on eBay like buy.com eBay is known as a site where asking questions is common, but to these large companies excessive question asking is an expense they would rather avoid.
The way I see it, if people want to avoid eBay fees they will be a lot more creative than using the messaging system.
I routinely contact my trading partners through messaging because of my niche (punk+heavy metal vinyl records) is inducive to buyers/sellers chatting about bands that we like.
I was under the assumption eBay wanted us to stick with their internal system. Well, now I’ll just directly email my trading partners.
I jsut used communication with others to prevent a fraud. A buyer claimed item not received, which I was about to voluntarily refund for, but noticed things didn’t appear to be quite right.
Their feedback, showed a very large percentage of transactions with another id in the paypal confirmed location the items were shipped to (which was far different then the ebay registered location). These ids had bought and sold to each other over 2 years piles of times…and amazingly were ale to leave feedback 2 minutes after the item ended.
Since ebay has hidden so much information I used goofbay to see buys/sells going back months. It appeared items bough from one of these ids would get sold by the other. It seemed really strange that the person had bought a number of items the same as the one I sold, and never left feedback except when their shill bidding made them win it from themself
So I probably broke some rules and messaged a couple of the sellers that the buyer hadn’t left feedback for, and sure enough their items “hadn’t arrived” either.
The buyer opened a paypal claim against me, and I told them I knew what they were doing and I’d be making a police report as soon as I lost the money. The paypal claim was closed, and buyer left me a neg while sending me a message that my item had initially been delivered to the wrong address and had just been received. I told the buyer I would ask Canada Post to investigate why so much o their mail isn’t be delivered properly if the neg wasn’t removed, and the buyer asked to remove it.
I know claims against some other sellers were closed at that time. The buyer had over 300 all positive feedback, at a glance looked like a great ebayer. Who knows how much they’ve stolen from others. it appeared they only left feedback as a buyer for very low priced items or items that would have to be sent tracked.
Ebay removed a few of the recent feedback between this persons 2 ids but left most of it, and contact info was changed (still false I believe) on several of us reporting this to them. neither Id NARU though (no activity since though.
Without being able to contact some other sellers I wouldn’t have been able to know for sure the not received complaint was false, and there would be no way to get together to go to the police if necessary…and the buyer would be ripping off more people as I type
It probably would have been me in trouble with ebay for contacting others and threatening this fraudster with a police report if he’d reported me to them.