Not so fast. A month later, eBay hits me with late fees and puts my eBay account on hold. Turns out, they didn't debit PayPal automatically as I'd asked them to. Instead, I was supposed to divine that auto-pay works only for invoices received after auto-pay is set up.
You might say that is predictable. In fact, that is how my bank works. When I sign up for e-bills or auto-pay, my bank warns that it might not kick in right away and that I should pay manually for the next billing cycle.
So here is my defense:
eBay and PayPal are part of the same company. Someone should be able to figure this out.
Not convinced? Fine, either was I. So when I first signed up for auto-pay, I asked eBay customer service when my account would be debited. They said it would happen in 5 or 10 days. They mentioned nothing about it *not* happening in the first billing cycle. Obviously, I was asking about that because people who had been using the service for more than a month wouldn't be asking the question!
Still not convinced? Fine, you're a skeptic. So am I. So when I didn't notice a debit (shortly before the payment was due--30 days after the invoice was sent), I again contacted customer support at eBay. Should I pay manually, I asked? No, they said, that would just result in a double payment and confuse everyone.
Okay, so I'm a lunatic raging against the machine, right? No, nothing of the sort. I calmly contacted customer service, asked them to remove the late fee and reinstate my account. Everyone makes mistakes, and they were entitled to a second chance.
Instead, they gave me the runaround through 10 emails, refusing to credit (drum roll please....) 8 cents! They insisted that because I wouldn't accept blame for their systems' limitations that I somehow did not understand them. The coup de grace (sp?) was their customer service rep (ironically named "Grace") chastising me to make sure I wouldn't let this happen again in the future.
So to summarize, eBay customer service sucks even worse than their software.
Can anyone recommend a better auction site with a liquid market in BrixWear T-shirts?
Bruce A. Epstein is the author of Director in a Nutshell and Lingo in a Nutshell, the coauthor of Dreamweaver in a Nutshell and the editor of ActionScript: The Definitive Guide.
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