Ebay and Pay Pal

EBay has been on of the biggest commerce success stories on the Internet.  My frustration with EBay is Pay Pal and spam. 

You buy something on EBay and you have the unfortunate experience that they own Pay Pal and use it to pay their customer transactions.  The user interface sucks.  You can never sign in under your supposed name and id.  I am at a loss to who is the bigger spam artist, EBay or PayPal.  I get something from them a few times a week although I supposedly opted out of that permission marketing. 

Truly, if any site uses PayPal, I bag the transaction.  I refuse to use their services.  EBay owns PayPal so in that case, you have no choice.  I like EBay.  I had a few items that I wanted to get rid of.  I hired one of the companies that come to your home, take a picture of your item and sell it for you on EBay.  They take a cut which is fine.  I got rid of the item and I never expected to see a dime so it was a total bonus. 

But, the few times that we have used EBay to purchase items for ourselves it has been a nightmare getting the transaction to go through.  Last night Jessica, our oldest daughter,  won an auction for something she was buying for her friend.  It took all of us over an hour to figure out how to execute the purchase.  We all wanted to toss the computer through the window. 

I don't get it?  EBay is one of the largest commerce sites on the web and they haven't figure out how to make the purchase easy.  They have you by the balls because nothing else out there is like EBay, so you have to suffer through the transaction process.  Did anyone over there ever think that perhaps they would have more customers if they actually fixed their user interface and stopped spamming people?  Aha.  Perhaps someone who owns stock in that company should mention it. 

Posted February 18, 2005  
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Joanne Wilson Joanne Wilson loves food, books, and music. She lives in New York City. Her husband Fred and children Jessica, Emily, and Josh are bloggers too. More »

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