Hi: I just replied to a survey about customer service. I am doing the one day ship and the 14 day return, to stay in good standing. Problem. Buyer purchases 2 items, pays me, doesn't want it shipped for 2 weeks, he is away. No problem, except that one day shipping thing. This is the second buyer this month. They can buy and pay, but they don't want things delivered until they are home. Customer Service does not have an answer for me. Shouldn't there be fixes for different circumstances?

Could put a notice on your listing, that buyer could wait to pay till they would be home. NOT lots of buyers would be away.

When you make these rules, got to cover a lot of different bases. I don't know what the answer should be, but someone in a high place should.

I just stumbled upon this thread while reading a post on Seller Central and saw the link to it.  The eBay Cafe?  It's been demoted from a special discussion board to a cafe?

Anyway, I seem to recall myself saying these words in the original survey thread.

Ebay:  Hope for the best, expect nothing.

That's what we got.

Kate's a nice lady who did the job she was given to do.  Her communication style was excellent and many thought she would be the "answer".  She told us specifically what she was tasked to do.  And as for everyone's concerns, she merely said she would pass them on to the appropriate departments.

Most of her posts were natural and conversational.  And believable.

This one however was crafted and probably not by her.  Finely crafted to sound sympathetic but give nothing.  No numbers, no percentages.  That's the eBay way.

My final thought -

J. Bodine

Kate

SSDD

blue_eyes_james wrote:

 

 I still seriously believe the people who program this site have no on-hands, real-world experience as an eBayer.

of course they dont...none of them do. I'm starting to think the PFCM's dont even have real world experience with their own job.... programming.

just for S & G's next time your on the phone with this oxymoron known as customer support ask the person your talking to ( if you can understand them that is) if they've ever sold on ebay...and because you will most likely get passed around to several differant employees all of which cant answer a simple question, ask all of them.

 I'd be willing to bet you get the same answer each time....NO.

Ignorance is bliss

honeville I applaud your optimism but you need to reread the "results"... ebay just patted themselves on the back and tossed our concerns right out the window.

I mean her opening sentence says it all...

"what we learned when we listened"  

Ignorance is bliss

To Kate and here team

There has been a lot of discussion on Feedback.  It's still a hot issue and a big part of that reason is because it's still wrong.  It's not running on all cylinders and it's affecting not only sellers in a negative way it's also needlessly tying up a lot of ebay's resources by making it become police, judge and jury. 

I'm sure most of you have some sort of a grasp on feedback but allow me to try and put the shoes on your feet for a minute in hopes of giving you a better understanding.

Kate,  You went through a lot of trouble to seek the opinion of the community.  Imagine that that action was "selling".  Imagine that everyone you came into contact with on the boards were "buyers".  Now give the community the chance to give you Feedback based on the interaction.  Obviously, by reading the posts you've already concluded that there is is a lot of ill-will out there so it's not too difficult to imagine that many of those "buyers" would express a negative opinion of their interaction with you.    Ouch...  But wait, it get's worse.  Your boss is watching you, and judging you solely by the communities opinion of you.  And it only takes a couple to really screw up your life.  Now ebay cuts your hours at work and reduces your take home pay.  They move your parking space and your office making it more difficult for you to get to work.  Why?  Because you weren't doing your job or because of peoples OPINIONS about you? 

Welcome to our world.  Ebay made FB one-sided and then they weapondized it.  Then they shrouded it in a mask so you can't even see who it is that is accusing you so you can A.  Defend yourself or B. Change something to make sure it doesn't happen again.  What's the end result?    Increased man hours on your customer service hot line, new departments to deal with buyer abuse, a reporting hub that I'm sure requires tons of man hours and is at best inefficient. 

Last time I lost my TRS was Dec 20th... just in time not to get the discount on $13,000 in sales.  What happened?  By mid-January you had NARU'd a few of the extortioners and removed their FB which would have made me not have lost my TRS.  You sent me an all exciting email boasting that you removed the feedback... but did you make restitution for the 20% discount that was robbed from me by extortioners?  heck no.  Did you go back in time and restore my standing in search during that time that resulted in less sales?  Heck no.  You just punished me on the word of a person whom you latter NARU'd. 

So what would you do?  How would you behave?  What if we, the community could call JD and have you schedualed for less hours and get a 2% cut in pay, a less convienant office and parking at the back of the lot?  And we could do so secretly, without you knowing which one of us did it and how you could avoid it??? 

Welcome to yabE.  (Yes, I know it's backwards)   

And you want to know why there is "noise".

I have met many GREAT EBAY SELLERS in my time and not one of them are the SCUM the ebay DSR'S make them out to be!

honeville1 wrote:

To Kate and here team

 

There has been a lot of discussion on Feedback.  It's still a hot issue and a big part of that reason is because it's still wrong.  It's not running on all cylinders and it's affecting not only sellers in a negative way it's also needlessly tying up a lot of ebay's resources by making it become police, judge and jury. 

 

I'm sure most of you have some sort of a grasp on feedback but allow me to try and put the shoes on your feet for a minute in hopes of giving you a better understanding.

 

Kate,  You went through a lot of trouble to seek the opinion of the community.  Imagine that that action was "selling".  Imagine that everyone you came into contact with on the boards were "buyers".  Now give the community the chance to give you Feedback based on the interaction.  Obviously, by reading the posts you've already concluded that there is is a lot of ill-will out there so it's not too difficult to imagine that many of those "buyers" would express a negative opinion of their interaction with you.    Ouch...  But wait, it get's worse.  Your boss is watching you, and judging you solely by the communities opinion of you.  And it only takes a couple to really screw up your life.  Now ebay cuts your hours at work and reduces your take home pay.  They move your parking space and your office making it more difficult for you to get to work.  Why?  Because you weren't doing your job or because of peoples OPINIONS about you? 

 

Welcome to our world.  Ebay made FB one-sided and then they weapondized it.  Then they shrouded it in a mask so you can't even see who it is that is accusing you so you can A.  Defend yourself or B. Change something to make sure it doesn't happen again.  What's the end result?    Increased man hours on your customer service hot line, new departments to deal with buyer abuse, a reporting hub that I'm sure requires tons of man hours and is at best inefficient. 

 

Last time I lost my TRS was Dec 20th... just in time not to get the discount on $13,000 in sales.  What happened?  By mid-January you had NARU'd a few of the extortioners and removed their FB which would have made me not have lost my TRS.  You sent me an all exciting email boasting that you removed the feedback... but did you make restitution for the 20% discount that was robbed from me by extortioners?  heck no.  Did you go back in time and restore my standing in search during that time that resulted in less sales?  Heck no.  You just punished me on the word of a person whom you latter NARU'd. 

 

So what would you do?  How would you behave?  What if we, the community could call JD and have you schedualed for less hours and get a 2% cut in pay, a less convienant office and parking at the back of the lot?  And we could do so secretly, without you knowing which one of us did it and how you could avoid it??? 

 

Welcome to yabE.  (Yes, I know it's backwards)   

 

And you want to know why there is "noise".

I know, I know...that's a lot to quote......but I think it's necessary. 

Honeville, Congrats on a very well crafted explanation.  I wish I could have said it better...but I can't!

I'm going on a guilt trip. Can you stop by and feed my paranoia?

honeville1 wrote:

I'd like to remind everyone of what Kate said on the 13th of July:

 

My team and I are actually quite excited about this survey. eBay has been conducting research (and reading the boards) about how our buyers / sellers / community use the site for years and in many different ways. But we wanted to try a new way to connect with all the people that are as invested in eBay as we are. My job involves a lot of collecting questions, distributing them to the right people, and then getting back to the teams at eBay with the answers. That’s why I think it’s cool that the User Experience Team is involving themselves here; we’re an information funnel. That’s why it’s not a “carrot” survey- great phrase by the way! – it’s actually a pilot for a possible new program and we needed a way to get all your valuable opinions in one spot. I’m excited about getting back to you in August and sharing that overview of what we’ve learned in the past few days from the overwhelming response and enthusiasm in this community.

For whatever reason we do appear to have the ears of ebay... at least to some degree.  To what result, we'll have to see.

Honeville, hope springs eternal.

It's eBay.  Hope for the best.  Expect nothing.

What the ???????....that's it....that's all ebay learned

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." Thomas Jefferson

What did eBay expect to learn from this survey that they couldn't have just learned from reading seller central for a couple of days?

Three weeks to learn less than nothing.  Assigning someone to field the questions and comments.  The money spent to write the survey.

They could have written OP's post above without even bothering with the survey.

And we actually thought we were going to see results and percentages.  What a joke.

Here are two paragraphs from a recent New York Times article about eBay.  The complete article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/business/ebays-turnaround-defies-convention-for-internet-companies.html

At the same time, EBay didn’t entirely abandon its roots — it’s still an e-commerce company. But “we had to make changes that were unpopular with subsets of our customers and other people. You have to have the conviction to do what you know is right,” Mr. Donahoe said. “We spent three years fixing the fundamentals and tried not to worry about what everyone else was saying.”

Management change is necessary and inevitable. Mr. Donahoe has been chief for just over four years, and has replaced most of eBay’s top management. “A significant change in senior leadership was necessary to take eBay to the next level,” he said. He built a team of managers who shared his dedication “to building a great and enduring company, a company that will last,” as he put it. “No one else has really done that on the Internet, and we’re excited by the possibility.” At the same time, he said, “We can’t take anything for granted. We’re almost paranoid. We get up every morning and we’re focused on delivering for our customers and continuing to innovate. It’s a fast-changing world.”

Does that sound like a company inclined to consider the results of a user survey?

For whatever reason we do appear to have the ears of ebay... at least to some degree.  To what result, we'll have to see.

Yes, we have their ears and have for the past 4 years. they are simply tired of hearing us on their board here and are trying to figure out a way to shut us up and to do it cheaply without losing their boards.

As far as Ebay is concerned, there is nothing else for them to hear. Some of you folks still believe things are as they are for lack of Ebay having a better idea or that they don't know what they are doing and that they should listen to us or do it themselves for awhile to get a real idea of what we go through.

They don't care what you are going through. As far as they are concerned, they need no ideas, it's just not that they are too stupid to listen. They want things just as they are. Pushing all the loss on to the seller so the company gets a bit of a rise in their stocks is what they were after, it's what they got and all they want. I do think that they don't know what they are doing in that they made everyone hate them on the way to their goal, that can never be good but, fact is, it was all by design and expected.

again, they had to know that in the process, they would make many people hate them, and normally, they wouldn't care about that so much because they can often bury that from many. But, us, here on the boards is hurting them somehow and they seem very intent on getting rid of us. This is probably one of the last few stands we have where they have little actual control, unless of course they choose to shut the boards down or run everyone off. If they shut down, they lose the free CS, good CS but, I don't know if they are that concerned about that now or not.

Those pinks that according to Kate, we will soon be seeing on the boards, something tells me, that can't be good at all but, I can't say for sure.

Haven't y'all noticed, all this is taking place at just about the same time as Ebay is going nutty trying to cheat folks out of their ability to post here?

I don't know for sure by any means but, was the survey simply an attempt to see if they could connect with us? It certainly seemed to have no other real purpose. Do they just want to know if a few bones will appease you? Did they see that you just aren't going for it so they just kind of let the survey fizzle? Hard to say but, I'm suspicious.

Ebay decided to be mean to people for their own gain, not ours, they made a lot of people mad at them and now they want to make that go away. whether it had anything to do with the survey or not and I do *think* it does as it was centered around community in part but, can't say for sure, it's still definitely true they want us to quiet down so, keep your eyes open.

Remember the Alamo.

Plant

“We spent three years fixing the fundamentals and tried not to worry about what everyone else was saying.”

Or:

We spent three years fixing the fundamentals and tried not to worry about all the people we were stepping on. We did our best to ignore their pleas to stop cheating them.

“A significant change in senior leadership was necessary to take eBay to the next level,” he said. He built a team of managers who shared his dedication “to building a great and enduring company, a company that will last,” as he put it.

Or:

He got enough like minded cheaters and low lifes together so he wouldn't have to put up with the present employees squeamishness about what he was going to do to people. 'You have to be mean and dishonest towards others in order to innovate, if you don't like it, I'll replace you.' (that's actually pretty revealing)

Plant