Monday 1 January 2007

Spam me, eBay, one more time

I know it's not like me to complain that eBay communicate too much: normally, it's exactly the opposite. But this week, I've had a bunch of communication from them that's gone beyond pointless, deep into 'completely infuriating' territory.

you have two alertsFirstly, we have the "you've changed your email" alert. Actually, I have two, because my main email account went down on Friday, came back Sunday, and so I changed to an alternate and then changed it back again. eBay put alerts in My Messages, great. And then they tell me I can't delete those alerts for ten whole day. WTF? I've read the messages, I made the changes, it's all legit, why do I have to have that stupid red blob at the top of my screen making me think that my seller account is overdue or some buyer has filed for non-something or other? I don't need it, eBay, I really don't.

Secondly, there's eBay's neat trick to double your spam. For some reason, rather a lot of Chinese wholesalers think that my gothy jewellery-selling ID might wish to invest in their electrical products. In fact, they're so sure that I should become a customer of theirs that on Christmas Day, they sent me spam ASQs from a dozen different accounts with the same enticing message. I know there's nothing eBay can really do about spam ASQs; I've been getting them for seven years, and I can deal with them. On Boxing Day, I duly clicked the "report" link beside each one in My Messages and grassed them up as spammers. So far, so good.

But then I received back, for each spamming ID, a "Communication Partner Warning" from eBay, informing me that a member with whom I had recently communicated had now been excommunicated from the site. These were not people from whom I'd bought, or to whom I'd sold. They were people who had sent me ONE email, whom I'd reported. And gotten a whole bunch more spam back from eBay as a result. Thanks. Thanks SO much.

Finally, and perhaps least expicable, is the "Notification of Change to my Feedback":

Dear biddybidbidbid,

A member with whom you've recently transacted has been indefinitely suspended from eBay within 90 days of registration. We have removed any feedback they left for you or others.

eBay removes feedback when a member is indefinitely suspended for certain policy breaches within 90 days of registration. eBay believes that members indefinitely suspended soon after registration shouldn't be able to permanently affect another member's account.

To see your current feedback score, go to your Member Profile.

Thank you,
eBay

They obviously liked me because I got fifteen of those messages: musta been a nice big order. But do eBay tell me who it was? Nope, not a clue. So what was the point of that? They don't tell me who the dodgy buyer was so I can look out for them when they re-register, or suggest that I keep an eye on their Paypal payment as a potential chargeback. Maybe they want to to make phishers lives easier by encouraging clicking of links in emails (which it does - I get this message from phishers too)? Who knows.

Please could someone who designs this rubbish for eBay actually start using the site, get rid of the stupid over-communication when it serves no purpose, and start communicating with users about the things that actually matter.

Labels: , , , ,

3 Comments:

Blogger Sue Bailey said...

Update
I whinged at PS support about the alerts and they have removed them! Perhaps if we all have a go at them about these stupid undeletable messages, they'll reconsider how long they appear in our messages :-D

2 January 2007 at 08:43:00 GMT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope so. The first 5 1/2 pages of my 'my messages' are all communication warnings for evil do-ers I reported in the first place. To be fair, many of these are more than 10 days old & therefore deletable but eBays settings mean they can only be deleted if I take the time to open them one at a time - and why would I want to do that?

With one hand they encourage us to use 'my messages', with the other, they make it an utter pain to do so.

2 January 2007 at 12:57:00 GMT  
Blogger Sue Bailey said...

Sam :-( I know you must get loads more of these than I do, and it must be SUCH a pain in the bum.

2 January 2007 at 13:02:00 GMT  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home