After writing about why Ebay vendors come to hate some of their customers, I realized that the vendors have many more reasons to hate Ebenezer (as I like to call it) than they ever could hate their customers. The customers, even some of the more annoying ones, represent revenue. Ebay represents only costs and pains: a sort of death of a thousand little inconveniences and surcharges, never improving for the vendor, always growing worse, and always masked in intellect-insulting peppy language about how great the change is.

Simple hint: the harder Ebenezer tries to convince the vendor that the change is for the vendor’s benefit, the more certain that vendor can be that the change works to the vendor’s detriment. That Ebenezer believes it can get people happy about actions that run counter to their own interests says a great deal about their low opinion of their vendors’ brainpower. It’s much like all the times other corporations send you something announcing: “We are again your best friends! To serve you better, we are raising costs, cutting support staff, adding extra pains to your ass, and removing any actual goodness you were getting from us! Aren’t you delighted?”

Just thrilled.

Here are some reasons your Ebay vendor might hate Ebenezer a little bit more every day. Note that this list is a snapshot in time. Next month, Ebenezer will have invented some fresh hells that we cannot yet quantify. We know only that it will be bad, and that it will come. But for now:

• Ebenezer lets people win auctions, then blow off payment with no meaningful penalty. Yes. Ever want to ruin a vendor’s day? Start new account, win highly contested auction, don’t pay. The buyer is never forced to complete a purchase. Ebenezer thus effectively allows the buyer to act in the worst of faith. Their “Will Sell” subcategory should be titled “Might Sell, If The Buyer Actually Pays.”
• Not only that; since Ebenezer won’t let you give negative feedback to a deadbeat or jerk buyer, your only feedback remedy is not to provide any feedback at all. There is no way to say “never give this purchase any feedback and clear it from my list.” It will sit therefore the full time allowed before your feedback option expires. And at the top of your dashboard, it will nag you that you still owe feedback for that one (and however many others).
• Ebenezer now and then hands out enormous numbers of fee-free listings, then stops handing them out for a month at a time. You see, Ebenezer wants vendors to buy store subscriptions, which will guarantee them a certain number of fee-free listings. If a listing doesn’t sell, it goes into Unsold listings, where it will vanish in two months if not relisted sooner. Of course, while it’s not listed, it cannot sell. It’s playing financial chicken with you.
• A recent Ebenezer fresh hell (“to help you sell more”) was changing all fixed price listings to “Good Till Canceled.” They now automatically renew each month (incurring a fresh listing fee), if not canceled first. If you have freebies, this relisting will chew those up; if you don’t have them and don’t want to incur the fees, you will have to end them all yourself before they would expire. No big deal if you have a new pile of freebies; very big deal if you have used up your monthly 50 and have 200 expiring. Oh, and the first time you attempt to end a batch of listings, half the time it makes you re-log in. You just checked one hundred boxes and hit End? Tough. Go check them all again and push the button again now that you’ve re-logged in. Thank you, Ebenezer, for “helping me to sell more” in this way. Don’t help me any more, okay?
• Ebenezer provides no way to mass relist items at a specified time. To do them in mass, the only way is to send them live immediately. Problem with that? Yes, because sometimes you would like to stagger them in groups, schedule them for specific times. And you can. One. By. Fucking. One. Hope you don’t have two hundred to do! Oh, wait…I always do.
• Ebenezer spazzes on your shipping location restrictions when you relist a GTC listing as auction, or an auction listing as GTC. In case you did not know, if the shipper doesn’t want to mess with shipping to certain types of addresses or countries, that is coded into a given listing (you could choose to ship this item abroad, for example, but not those). Except that once you change between listing types, you can no longer see this list of shipping exclusions. Is it still there? You will have to click on the link to go in and see. It usually is, but it’s a needless and annoying step.
• Ebenezer has a very stupid volume discount function that was evidently so bad they commented it out for about a year while they tried to fix it. Now it might work as designed, but as designed, it’s dumb. The first discount percentage must apply to two of the same item. The second must apply to three. The fourth must apply to four or more. So there is no way to dispense with two and three, and offer a discount only for four or more. This is minimally useful and no one thought it through, which seem to be the primary qualifying traits for any new Ebenezer feature.
• Ebenezer lets sellers pay an extra selling fee to promote listings. This is generally a good method for sellers, because there’s a fair chance people will discover your other stuff after viewing the promoted listing. However, since one is invited to name one’s ad percentage, in order to get premium placement one must offer a fee percentage that is sufficiently high to exceed the highest known past fees–typically 6-9%. If you want to screw Ebenezer, when you see a promoted listing and want to buy it, make a note of it and then log out, log in, and choose the search result for that item that does not indicate a promoted listing. You might have to dig through the vendor’s listings to achieve this. While it’s true the vendor will never know you did this for him/her, should a problem come up, the fact that you did so will get you all the favorable consideration you can find from him/her–plus, you have the fun of knowing you screwed Ebenezer.
• Ebenezer’s descriptive field. Oh, gods, how I hate their descriptive field. What it really is: simple HTML that is normally hidden. There are codes present that you can not see unless you choose to show the HTML. So if you backspace to just the wrong spot, a bunch of formatting will disappear without being apparent. Copy and paste text from certain sources? No text at all will show, nor can be made to show. It looks WYSIWYG, but it isn’t. It sounds infuriating? Oh, it is. How it is. Did you accidentally, innocently use a # (octothorpe) in your listing, for example to begin a serial number or other identifier? The entire remainder of the text is hidden–and you have no idea why unless you happen to have some understanding of HTML, or you eventually come to notice that the octothorpe (no, that’s not a “hash tag”) is the problem child.
• Ebenezer’s stores. A store subscription amounts to paying more money for a worse outcome in return for a certain number of guaranteed listings. (Their analysis and productivity tools don’t seem to do anyone any good.) How could it be worse? I’ll tell you. The standard freebie issue is fifty per month, either auction-style with Buy It Now or fixed-price Good Till Canceled. Buy the basic store for, what is it, $9/month? It says you get 100 free listings–and you do. Not 150; 100, so it’s just fifty extras. You find that out after you pony up for the first month. Oh, and your whole 100 now do not include Buy It Now on auction items, so those basic fifty are now worse than before! There’s Ebay, always looking out for you!
• Ebenezer constantly tacks on new little fuckeries. In the time I have been doing this, I have seen them dink away at profit margins with little stuff like higher fees for books, can’t use freebies for this or that category, the previously mentioned store ripoff, and more. It’s always something.
• Ebenezer purports to offer the vendor help with item listings by auto-filling from the Ebay catalogue. I wouldn’t let it. “Auto-fill” may create a listing full of bullshit. The smart vendor just refuses the help and describes it without intervention from Ebenezer, because you can take this to the bank: if the description contains one fiction, and the buyer points it out, the explanation of “It’s not my fault; Ebay’s catalogue was wrong” will cut zero ice. It’s the vendor’s obligation to describe the item accurately, and the less help from Ebenezer, the better.
• Every little extra thing costs a little hit, the death of a thousand fees. Want to add a reserve price? Fee. Claim the item fits into more than one of Ebenezer’s remarkably inadequate categories? Fee. Larger photo in gallery? Fee. Every time you turn around, it seems, there’s a little fee. Don’t think they add up? Ebenezer does.
• As a practical matter, it is impossible to sell on Ebenezer without a Paypal account. Paypal is horrible. It’s Ebenezer’s pet payment service, and if you don’t use it, I am reliably informed that you become a preferred fraud/scam target. It’s like a shotgun wedding to a horrible spouse.
• Ebenezer has a terrible help system. Try to use the one that’s easy to find, on the right side of the screen? That doesn’t go to anything but a list of FAQs. You have to scroll all the way down, and when you do start digging, half the time the help you find answers only questions you did not have. Last month, I actually used Ebenezer’s help to find a semi-answer as to how to do something. Once the disbelief wore off, I felt like celebrating.
• One of the many worthwhile concepts Ebenezer has botched is Customer Questions. If the customer chooses to Ask the Seller about an item, the seller gets a message. What’s wrong with that? Sometimes you cannot clear the stupid things. There is some metric that measures your response and clears the flag, but if that is missed or somehow fails to function, and the Mark as Answered doesn’t work, the question still shows in need of a response, glowing in all its irrelevancy.
• Ebenezer wants you to buy postage from them. On the plus side, it’s cheaper than at USPS. Problem: you’d better know your postal regulations very well. I suppose it’s great if everything you sell complies with a certain form factor or two, but for variable stuff…well, there’s a good chance your shipments will get delivered postage due. In any case, my complaint isn’t that Ebenezer offers postage. My complaint is that their process does its very best to nag you into buying theirs. By itself, it would mean little. Taken as part of the whole, it’s just one of the ten thousand cuts. If I wanted to buy the postage from them, I would do it without being pushed.
• Another Ebenezer pushiness, far more toxic, is always in the directions of new interfaces that make everything much harder. It’s much as if there’s some buyer-hating sadist constantly tinkering with the system. Now, I’m not automatically resistant to change. Some changes are all right. But the mantra of “change is good; embrace the change” is for morons. The growth of a malignant tumor is change: is it good? Change is morally and qualitatively neutral on its face. Whether it is good depends whether it helps more or hurts more. Ebenezer’s changes tend to be badly thought out by a PHB somewhere, and more often hurt than help.
• When someone stiffs you on Ebenezer (and they will, and Ebenezer will do nothing useful about it), the amount due shows up for two full months even when you’ve reported it as uncollectible and gotten your fees back. Yes. Even when they couldn’t pay you if they wanted to, it shows you are owed the money.
• Now and then, when you are going through and relisting a hundred or so items one by one (because Ebenezer won’t let you select a time to relist them all at once), you find that one of your listings is now missing its photos. Since Ebenezer requires photos, that one won’t go. Hope you kept copies!
• Ebenezer interprets trade embargos literally and eternally. Got a Persian artifact from the Sassanid era (before Ayatollahs, Islam, or even the modern boundaries of Iran)? Can’t list that; it’s Iranian! They will take it down and send you a warning. Ever think of selling an aboriginal artifact from Cuba? Gods, don’t use that word, or down it will come–never mind that it has zero connection to trafficking with the modern Cuban state. It could have been in this country for generations before Castro; they don’t care. That’s what happens when you deal with simpleminded idiots.

If there were a less odious alternative, I’d definitely consider it.