eBay Malaysia Had Better Be Serious About E-Commerce!

Ebay Malaysia had better be serious about ecommerce.

I attended an Ebay Malaysia luncheon recently and was pleasantly acquainted with Dan Neary and gang. I was pretty much impressed by the menu, but I was even more attracted to the preview on eBay that followed.

Although I had an eBay account, I never thought I would want to do any transaction, simply because I didn't really trust it. I joined back then because it appeared then that it might be useful. Somehow, I didn't do any selling or buying simply because there were other alternatives, those that I considered pretty secure.

But that short lunch talk bought me over and I decided to take the plunge several weeks later. Boy, was I in for a rude shock - trying to register was hell since eBay Malaysia kept saying a legitimate credit card was wrong!

To make matters worse, the so-called Live Help was no help at all. Despite stating that it would be available from 8:30 to 4:30 Mon-Fri, no help was forthcoming and I found myself waiting silly for one to come - on a Friday several times between the stipulated times.

As I checked further, I realised that the PayPal registration link returned a 404 .

How can eBay make it so tough just to sign up to trade? I understand not everyone faced this problem; I could just be unlucky.

But isn't there a system audit to ensure all links are working and all services up to notch? How can Live Help be of no help at all and dead links still alive on an ecommerce sign-up page?

Perhaps the public relations department people (or do you call them community relations now?) can do something after reading this.

A persistently failing system is definitely bad public relations and dirties the corporate image. Where ecommerce is concerned, it is really really bad for business!