Facts on eBay for Buyers.

Do you know what to do when something goes wrong with your eBay account?

Here are the questions that I hear all the time from buyers.

1. Is there an Customer Service number I can use to call for help?

eBay are notoriously hard to contact, should you ever need to; then it sometimes seems like they expect the site to run itself. The best way to get customer support would be to use online help, and to do this you need to use this url address: http://pages.ebay.com/help/contact_us/_base/index.html. You might have better luck in a “live help” web chat here: http://pages.ebay.com/help/basics/n-livehelp.html.

Only eBay Power Sellers (sellers with a very high feedback rating) get to phone customer service. However, you might be able to go about it in a different way, for instance, you could type in; ’eBay (add your country) phone number’; into a search engine and see what you can find that way. Unfortunately, the chances are you’ll have gone to all that trouble for the privilege of leaving a phone message on an answering machine.

It might seem cruel, but imagine the number of people who would call for eBay help every day with the silliest questions if they gave out their phone number everywhere.

2. eBay Sent Me an Email Saying They’re Going to Close My Account, What Should I Do?

If this happens to you, then you must first look to see if the email is asking for your password. If that pops up in your email, then it’s a scam, only intended to get your information and steal your account. eBay will never ask for your password or any other account details by email. Their policy is that you should ONLY enter your password on pages that begin with: http://signin.ebay.com/. eBay offers an extensive amount of information on all their policies, such as, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions and Security. To read more go to: http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/toolbar/useragreement.html

Note: These some policies were updated September 23, 2008 to reflect deletion of the Account Guard functionality from eBay Toolbar. 3. Making money on eBay, how does it work?

It is absolutely free for buyers! However, sellers will have to pay various fees when applicable, such as, listing fees for each item and a value fee, which is a percentage of sold items). They can then pay optional fees for extra services, including: Buy it Now, extra pictures, reserve prices, highlighting the auction, putting it in bold, listing it first in search results, or even putting it on the front page. You can see a full list of fees at http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html.

These fees are apparently not a hindrance to the sellers, because more and more, people continue to use eBay . The system is quite efficient, and basically forces both eBay and the sellers to keep their profit margins as low as possible - otherwise prices will simply go too high and the buyers will stop buying.

4. How Safe is eBay?

eBay has a Trust & Safety (SafeHarbor) Answer Center, where members can ask questions about Trust & Safety initiatives and use the member-to-member question & answer boards. Once on the ’Safe Harbor’ page, you will find information on, hijacked accounts, online safety and how to scam proof your emails, the direct link to this is: http://answercenter.ebay.com/forum. You will be able to get your questions answered on the eBay site links mentioned in this article, and no doubt you will learn a lot of information to make your time on eBay all the more successful.