Being an Internationista, moving home is part of my life. Seven cities in the past seven years, across four different countries. This means lots of removalists, lots of packing and unpacking and most importantly lots of selling of houseware items too big or expensive to move from one city to the next.
A couple of years ago, while in one country, instead of the old fashioned garage sale I decided to go all high tec and sell my items on E-Bay. Fortunately for me I had already opened up an E-Bay account a few years back, when the whole E-Bay phenomenon hit our screens, while living in another country. Unfortunately, as my account had been set up in a different country to the one I was currently in I was unable to reorganise my account to work in my new country so after some correspondence with E-Bay and some disgruntled comments airing my disappointment over how an international online operation did not cater for international users, I started working on my garage sale placards.
Now two years later another move is on the cards in yet another country and once again I have many an item to sell. After having obvious selective amnesia over my last encounter with E-Bay I spent a few hours taking photos the measurements and descriptions of the items and went to log on to my E-Bay account. Once in I was unable to access the Sell section without another security number.
After two days of trying to find customer support as my searches through the E-bay site kept flicking me through to the E-Bay sites in the various countries I have previously lived I found help through the live chat in the country I am currently in.
The live chat that followed was this:
Thanks for waiting and welcome to eBay Australia LiveHelp! My name is ....How can I help you today?
Hi I seem to be having trouble with my log on. I can log in but then when I go to the sell section it asks me to log in again and I don't seem to have the number they are requesting. When I click for them to resend me the number a: we are experiencing technical difficulties, comes up. I have a feeling that I am not completely registered.
I understand that you are having trouble working on your eBay account as you are constantly asked to sign back in.
No worries, let me help you out.
Aside from this, is there anything else that you want me to look into?
Well while I have you I might as well check something else. I originally set up my account when I was living in the UK and now I am living in Australia and have an Australian address in my account details but every now and then it clicks me through to the UK ebay section - eg: I think I've been trying to contact the UK customer support over past two days. Can I set my account to Australia only?
I will discuss this with you once I'm done investigating your account. May I ask for 2 minutes, please?
No problem. Thanks
Thanks. I'll be back in a moment.
Thanks for waiting.
It seems that your account has been dormant for a long time and that is why it has been closed on our end.
The best option I can offer you is to create a new eBay account. But you will have to use a new email address as well as User ID.
I don't have another email account. Is there a way of just disabling my old account and starting a new one using the only email address i have?
No, as the old account has been closed with the email address, you will have to create a new email account to be able to register with eBay again.
It's actually easy to create a new email account.
I’m sorry I'm not going to create a new email account just for ebay. This seems strange. Can you imagine if all online operators acted in the same fashion. How many different email accounts would one person need?
Chat Session Ended, Goodbye. (5009)
Aside from the absurdity of having to open up a new email account every time you are away from your E-Bay account for an extended period of time, along with the concern that despite deactivating my account E-Bay still keeps my personal email details on record and as I can't log in to the specific section, it won't allow me to remove or change my personal contact details, ow, and not to mention the appalling customer service that ended without resolving any questions and the loss of a customer for life, this does seem to be yet another example of the online world being as useless as tits on a bull.
In this case not just for an internationista but also for anyone who doesn't buy or sell items on E-Bay regularly. Time and time again I get annoyed and disappointed when accessing an online service or product in replace of the tangible. Not only do I get annoyed about not being able to obtain my desired outcome, above all I get annoyed that the experience almost always ends up being completely contrary to the promoted ethos of online living - convenience, time saving and cost saving. Instead, it’s simply useless.
Or perhaps the E-Bay method has nothing to do with being useful or useless perhaps it's just a way of penalising users when they don't buy or sell enough? Wasting our time and money to make more money.
Whatever the reason, until these online outlets are regulated by some kind of industry standards we will be forever doomed to useless consumer processes and services that are unlikely to have been experienced by any generation before the internet.
In the good old days bad customer service and ineffective processes would mean companies would be out of business. Today, the bad new days, it just means living online.
Right, best get back to creating some new garage sale placards!
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