"I think sellers need compensation, or at the very least auctions extended - we're losing money by ebay being down"
oh ffs, get a shop
eBay went titsup earlier today, and the company is now attempting to bring its site back to life. The online tat bazaar coughed to an unexplained technical blunder preventing an unknown number of its subscribers from accessing the site, which many buyers and sellers of used goods enjoy using in their spare time on the weekends …
Some people use eBay for their livelihoods, due to the auction format used on eBay often you find most of the money only comes in within the last 10 minutes so you might not be surprised to find out a lot of people might feel cheated if no one could bid on their items when they were finishing.
Alternatively you could blame and tell them to get a shop as that's obviously a five minute job but I'd be willing to bet if it was your money you'd be a little less nonchalant about the matter.
the fact is these people chose to use the service and chose to accept ebay's terms and conditions which give no promise of availability or reliability
ebay isn't a human right, it's a choice they made, if it goes titsup they have to accept it, otherwise they can get a shop and manage the issues themselves
I've unloaded close a £1k of old crap on eBay over the years, including a solitary left glove I found in the pocket of a dead man's bike jacket that came with a bike I bought off autotrader. It's no harder to use (when you can actually log in to it) now than it was when I started. They even have promotions specifically for low volume sellers although you get bummed on the fees if you're not a business seller.
The only significant change for amateur sellers is the new postage pricing which will be handy once I've actually managed to set up all the prices, lol.
"I've unloaded close a £1k of old crap on eBay over the years, including a solitary left glove I found in the pocket of a dead man's bike jacket that came with a bike I bought off autotrader."
Wow. Think what ISIS could make on Ebay with all the stuff they must be finding in dead men's clothing at the moment.
"They stitch you up with eBay fees and gouge you again by taking a cut from PayPal. Avoid this tat bazaar."
Yes.
Just like anyone stitches you up by advertising services with associated costs, and punters say yes, take the services and the costs and feel well and truly stitched up.
Every service should be cost free. Obviously.
I'm sure that whatever you do, you do for no charge. I'm sure that you wouldn't stitch anyone up and then gouge them by charging anything for whatever you provide.
Great Time for Another Rate Increase for All eBay Sellers! All eBay should have their listing fees increase by 25%. Big bonus for all incompetent eBay management and employees, especially big dumb lazy and useless customer serve representatives who don't know to how give good customer service.
Even though eBay is a huge, world-wide "thing" it just doesn't have the scale, or acumen, or skill to do all this stuff itself. As sure as I'm sitting here, there is as little "off-the shelf" stuff inside eBay as they can possibly manage to have. They start with open-source (read: free) SW. Then they build their own servers, network stuff, OS stack, messaging system, scheduler, DB, and on and on. They're just to good to use (and pay for) any horrible "vendor" stuff in their house. Their ego is equally too huge to admit that someone else may know better.
Also, as sure as I'm sitting here, the outages they have had in the last week did, or should have, cost them as much as they have saved doing it themselves. I'll bet a steak dinner that DB2 and MQ and GPFS, or whatever Oracle sells that is similar but not as good, would not have let this happen. The big banks around the world know this, somebody should tell eBay execs.