CORE, the UK based Campaign Of Rebuffed Ebayers, has announced plans for its next protest action against the leading auction website. Campaign organizers are calling for a four day ‘Clean Up Ebay’ protest (CUE) from 21.00 GMT on Thursday 14th September until the same time Monday 18th September 2006.
A spokesman for the group said; “This is more than just a listing strike as we are now asking all eBayers to get involved. We are calling for both buyers and sellers to stop trading during this four day period and donate some of the time saved to report as many of the obvious bad listings on eBay as they can. We are also asking all remaining eBay shop sellers to put their shop ‘on holiday’ for the duration the protest”.
Derived from the original Fee Protest Group which organized the high profile listing strike in August, due to Ebay's sudden and extreme fee increase, CORE has now attracted over 1,160 signatures to a petition in Ebay’s discussion forums.
Their spokesman continued; “The number signing the petition in the UK has more than doubled since our last one day action in August. This suggests customers attitude toward eBay is still hardening. It appears the latest round of fee hikes of up to 100% recently imposed by eBay served as a ‘tipping point’ for many site customers’ to cry foul for a variety of reasons.”
Complaints received by CORE have significantly broadened from the original fee hike issue. Failings to police the site adequately for, so called, scam listings, poor customer services, increased fees being passed on to buyers, the flooding of the site by users in the far east who are granted fee free access to eBay and shop listings not being found by searches are just some of the issues that have been highlighted.
“This is why we are looking to bring all eBay users together by asking everyone to boycott all buying and selling activity for these four days and report as many bad listings as they can. Many users believe eBay fail to take timely action against rule breaking listings when they are reported. We therefore trust publicity surrounding this next phase of our protest will give eBay sufficient time to gear up resources to deal with the increased number of listing reports they will be getting.
To date eBay management in the UK and US has remained tight lipped about the effects of user protests and many critics believe they are risking long term damage to their business by appearing out of touch with their customers. Protests are continuing in other European countries, the US , Canada and Australia and international cooperation between various protest groups is understood to be growing.
Alternative web based auction sites, while in eBays shadow at the moment, have reported increases in their auction listings of up to 35% in the past month, a fact which shouldn’t have gone unnoticed by the market leader’s management.
CORE spokespeople can be contacted via: ebayprotestgroup@googlemail.com
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