Now let me start by giving you the background to this story, which started back in November 2006 and the reason I have waited so long to tell it.

OK first of all I want to try and put you in the right frame of mind, that way you will know where I am coming from and why I am making this statement that ebay killed my business. Now imagine you are running a successful internet business and things are starting to develop, you are earning good money on eBay as a trading assistant, your whole business model is centred on eBay, you have been successfully trading for about three years, you are now at power seller status and you are about to put together the modules for your new training courses you are going to be running, you have a local investor ready to put money into your business, you have the premises the equipment, you have spent months creating the course materials and researching your market. And on a cold frosty November day one of your computers fails, it’s the one which runs your eBay account it’s the one with all the account information, it’s the one that you knew you should have backed up, but just didn’t, come on you know we have all been there, when that little voice inside your head says don’t forget to backup, your brain replies with a message to self, backups yes of course I back up all my files and store them on disc, (like boll**ks you do) it’s just one of those things which you put off to do later. Until it fails and you wish to god that you kept a backup….

So the inevitable happens and your computer fails, and in the meantime you have people buying your stuff on ebay, all wondering why it hasn’t been sent, all poised ready to give you negative feedback so they can damage your perfect 100% current feedback score, you know the type those little sh**ts who take great pleasure in giving you negative feedback because the postage stamp was a little crooked when you stuck it on the package, or the postal service left their package with a neighbour and they didn’t get it for three days because they failed to check before they rushed to give you negative feedback. Well that’s what happened to me, due to the computer failure I could not access the computer to retrieve the addresses for the people who had bought a few weeks earlier.

So lets get to the point here… I do tend to waffle sometimes, OK once the computer was fixed bear in mind that this was about a 3 week period, I could see that three people had left negative feedback, and I was notified by eBay that a couple of disputes had been raised, and my account was restricted which means you only get limited access, now please accept my apologies if you are not familiar with this, basically the main function you need to resolve these issues is to be able retrieve your history, to check the sales to confirm the dispute details, i.e. addresses, because if you can’t retrieve the address how can you resolve the dispute. When your account is restricted basically all you can do is send emails to the buyers, so imagine this, Mrs Smith (not the real name), claims she has not received her consignment, which later you discover is a packet of Velcro Coins you where selling at the time (priced @ £2.00 approx $4.50.)