Ebay ® unfortunately scams a seller, fraud stock deserves to drop

First off, a few months ago I had over 90 positive feedback with 100% satisfaction on ebay. This was earned over years of transactions. Unfortunately ebay ® recently made some changes that really hurt my business in several ways. Including my business reputation, pocket book and lots of wasted time.

I have been selling on ebay ® for years, however I began selling web site hosting services on ebay quickly within one month racked up over $400 promoting my products and business. I was offering a discounted auction to give ebay ® users a great start up rate on web site hosting. I was offering them an introductory rate of $.01 or $1 for a few 1 - 3 free months of services.

I soon found out that other ebay ® users were buying my auctions and not signing up for hosting services, therefore costing me a large amount of money. I later complaned about this (see below).

After some research I found out why I was getting a lot of people buying my auctions and not signing up for my services. Turns out that ebay ® created a search function that gives ebay ® users better rankings if they have higher feedback rankings. Additionally ebay ® implemented a feature that requires a certain amount of feedback for users to be able to sell on ebay ®. So in essence what was happening was people were bidding on my auctions that I paid ebay ® for, sending me (often times) one penny and then requesting positive feedback. This had me outraged because it was costing me large amounts of money to list these auctions and costing a lot of money on marketing. Then a lot of my auctions were being taken down by fake bidders.

Another thing that ebay ® did was remove ANY SELLERS ability to leave negative feedback about buyers that treat sellers poorly, which makes absolutely no sense because sellers are the only people that pay ebay ®. These people that help make ebay ® succeed in the stock market are the ones getting treated terrible and not being able to protect themselves from buyers abusing their system.

Fake bidders kept requesting I leave them positive feedback after sending them a penny. I wanted to leave them negative feedback, however since ebay ® removed this function, I was being held hostage by all bidders to leave them positive feedback because they are the only ones that can hurt my credibility by leaving me negative feedback. If I didn't leave them feedback and they sent me money, they had the right to leave me negative feedback.

On 9/4 I sent an email telling ebay ® the following: (exact message below)

I have several hundred listings for hosting online. The reason I listed

all of these online was because I thought since people were bidding they

were going to sign up for the service I was offering. So a few hundred

dollars later, it turns out 3 out of 4 people are bidding on my items

just to hold me hostage for positive feedback. This is terrible and

expensive. How can this be resolved?

I never received a response until 9/10 when ebay ® shut down my account and hundreds of my auctions I spent around 50 hours working on. I was astonished! I attempted to contact ebay ® regarding this on the phone, however their phone number hangs up on you and does not offer any sort of support. This company is very scarey, because I believe that companies that treat customers like this are destined for failure. I personally decided to get rid of any mutual funds or financial obligations that invested in ebay ® stock because I felt that negative things could potentially happen. Only my personal opinion obviously.

After requesting help and spending hundreds of dollars with ebay ®, my account was shut down. Not to mention, many legitimate accounts I obtained ended up cancelling services from me because ebay ® sent them a letter saying that I was abusing their services and that any feedback I left for them was not legitimate.

After everything I have paid around a thousand dollars paying and improving my ebay ® auctions, put in tons of hours and feel abused by ebay ®. I also am shutting down several companies that I run that use paypal ® as a payment provider.

Obviously this is all my personal opinion and ebay ® and paypal ® are all Designated trademarks and brands that are the property of their respective owners.

Regards,

Joel McLaughlin