You probably have, and you may on occasion have found your listing not present on eBay. Yet! You might wonder: have you made a mistake, did you upload your listing correctly, is there some other reason eBay chose not to accept your listing?
More likely than not your listing is sitting alongside hundreds or thousands more, waiting its turn to go onto eBay?s system.
But how long will you wait, another five minutes, maybe quarter of an hour?
Try 24 hours or more! That?s how long lawyers in the USA are claiming eBay sometimes takes to actually feature listings pre-paid by eBay sellers they are representing.
Lawyers have filed a lawsuit against the online auction site on behalf of eBay customers. The suit claims eBay took payment for listings of specific duration which fell short of the time paid for by their eBay clients.
"eBay has been deceiving millions of consumers over the years by claiming that their auctions start when submitted, when in reality they do not begin for at least several hours, and up to 24 hours," said the attorney leading the litigation, "However, the clock starts running on your selected auction time even though eBay has not posted it yet."
It is estimated that millions more eBay sellers stand to jump on the bandwagon if damages are awarded in landmark cases currently confronting eBay.
Which makes me wonder whether these eBay sellers and their lawyers have actually tried uploading anything to the Internet, have they ever tried uploading thousands of items concurrently to the Internet?
I think not, otherwise they?d know instant uploading just doesn?t happen. Uploading time varies depending on the amount and size of data being uploaded, and pictures, of which most eBay listings have several almost always take longer than text data.
All in all, I think eBay is a wonderful place to run a business, it?s fast, efficient and very inexpensive, too. Try placing an advertisement in a national newspaper for seven days, see how much you?ll pay for that, see how few potential customers you?ll reach compared to the massive target audience possible on eBay. Try contacting someone to correct a newspaper advertisement that?s been printed incorrectly, compare how long that takes to the few minutes taken to review and correct an eBay listing.
Not only that but also:
I list ten to one hundred items on eBay every day, literally every day, and within minutes I go check everything uploaded correctly. How many times have I spotted an item appearing late on eBay? Once! How late was that listing? About five minutes!
All I can say is, I think claimants and lawyers to this suit are not representative of most sellers? experience on eBay, I have never met anyone facing problems they claim to experience and I talk to thousands of eBay sellers every month through a newsletter I edit here in the UK.
It worries me that, if eBay is required to pay up for the odd handful of late listings, the amount could run to millions of dollars, and like any business facing increased operating costs, it could mean higher fees for the rest of us.
And that just isn?t fair, not for the rest of us, not for eBay!