eBay have emailed sellers affected by the site outage last Friday who are in line for compensation under eBay’s Site Outage Policy.
In truth for most sellers, whilst it was an incredible annoyance and caused significant disruption to business through the inability to process orders and despatch, the actual cost which eBay will compensate you is minimal. Most sellers use fixed price format for which insertion fees, whilst not always zero, are negligible. Plus of course, with long duration listings, it’s likely not too many of your listings were due to end on Friday morning.
The real cost to sellers is the lost sales from buyers that couldn’t sign in or complete orders. It would be unreasonable for eBay to compensate you for loss of business – that’s a standard business contract clause which just about any of your suppliers will have in their terms and conditions.
What is useful is the feedback protection assurance, however this is the one place I feel eBay could do somewhat better. eBay are promising protection for any transactions which occurred during the outage, but in reality it’s transactions which were due to ship on that Friday which will be most affected – especially bearing in mind that there was a bank holiday on the Monday so not shipping Thursday’s orders on Friday delayed them by at least four days.
What is good is the speed at which they’re operating with any credits due to be applied to your account by the end of August, which from past experience is stellar performance and way faster than previous glitch credits have been applied.
We can also confirm that eBay are classifying the outage as a an outage of less than two hours. However they’re extending the credit period to all listings due to end in a much longer time frame to include whilst the site was intermittently unavailable.
eBay Site Outage email full text
As you may know, on August 23 from 07:45 am to 02:00 pm British Summer Time, several eBay sites and customer service platforms around the world experienced intermittent outages. These outages were a result of technical issues that occurred during scheduled maintenance.
With the core technical issues resolved, we are now working to build additional safeguards into the maintenance process to prevent this from happening again. We’d like to assure you that at no point during this incident were any personal information at risk.
As a seller impacted by these outages, we’re writing to tell you about the actions we’re taking:
• We will credit all associated fees for listings that were scheduled to end on August 23 between 07:45 am to 02:00 pm British Summer Time.
• We will remove any negative feedback for communication or ship time on transactions that happened during this same timeframe.
The credits mentioned above will be applied to your account by the end of August and reflected on your next invoice.
We understand the impact that an outage of this scope can have on you, our valued sellers, and we sincerely apologize for this disruption. As always, thank you for selling on eBay.
Sincerely,
Your eBay Team