Do Not Complain
This might not be of interest to the majority of readers, but those it does pertain to will find it so.
I have discovered that complaining to the big companies does one no favours.
I listed 3 items for sale on Ebay the Internet’s largest auction site at about 6pm on Saturday evening. I chose that time to take advantage of the early weekend surfers browsing for new items. I listed them for a 7 day duration to also catch the early weekend “bargain hunters” the next Saturday evening.
I used the online facilities provided at the site to make my auction listing, so as to not be penalised for using external software. I paid extra for a gallery listing, so my item would be more visable. I chose Paypal their credit card processing company as a method of payment to make it easier for potential buyers… in short I attempted to give Ebay the company as much money as I could for providing me with the service.
After completing the task of creating my listings, I went and had some dinner.
Just before retiring to bed, I thought I would have a look to see if I had any bids on my items. I was curious to see if my early listing ’strategy’ had paid off.
I went through the category listings, but could not find my items. I searched for words that I had put in the titles of my lots, but my items did not appear in the results.
After wasting about 15 minutes going through the maze they call a help section, I ran across a “Find Your Item” page. I entered my item numbers and received a message each time stating my item could not be located in the database. I was told that if I had just registered the item I should “wait a few minutes for the listings to update”.
I wondered what they meant by “a few minutes”, so emailed to ask. I explained that I had created 3 listings at approx 6pm and that my items were not visible at midnight. In the email I requested compensation for the loss of 6 hours of ‘prime-time’ traffic.
The next morning I checked the listings again and this time found all of my items. 2 had had a bid on them already, so it appears that if I had got them listed when I had expected them to be, I would have had more bids.
It is now Wednesday morning, I still have had no response to my intial question… instead I received an email informing me that my items have been deleted from the database, because of a “policy infringement”!
I must admit, I haven’t read through all of their policies, so I can only assume one of them states:
xx.xx You, as a seller, waives the right to complain about our service. This includes, but is not limited to: the delay in publishing of listings on any of our sites…
I say that, because the policy that the email refers to is being broken by at least 312 other listings (yes… I searched and counted!), so it appears I was targeted for complaining. Either that, or I am better at searching than their policy enforcement staff, in which case I offer this post as a letter of application of employment 
I know this won’t get my listing put back on. I know it won’t stop the big companies from ’shitting’ on their customers, but it makes me feel better knowing that I, perhaps, can inform someone about what is happening in the world of big corporations.
Even if an Ebay auction house representative reads this and it causes them to think twice about pressing the delete button on just one future listing because of a ‘policy infringement’ that is being broken by hundreds of Power other Users, it would have served its purpose.