PayPal UK rolled some site maintenence at breakfast time today and sellers have been unable to view transaction details ever since,  eBay Canada suffers a broken Checkout, and is the Seller Dashboard up the creek again?

PayPal UK pre-announced maintenance and site down time for an hour scheduled for before the business day this morning, but at the end of the business day, sellers are still unable to view the details pages for payments received.  The error manifests itself as a never-loading page.  Several threads with many posts by eBay sellers have appeared on eBay UK complaining of this disruption, which typically arrived on a UK Cheap Listing Day, bringing back memories of the debacles in 2005-6.  Do eBay and PayPal never liaise about days on which maintenance and upgrades should NOT be done?

One seller who operates with an advanced internal network and servers has reported also that during PayPal UK’s never loading page cycle, there is code from PayPal being launched against their servers attempting to extract the seller’s LAN administrator user ID and Password.  This begs the question whether PayPal have been hacked (again) and whether or not malicious code has been inserted.

As usual, there are no follow-on or explanatory announcements on either eBay UK or PayPal UK.  There are many comments on the eBay UK boards about a lack of Pink-presence this week too.   Detailed Seller Ratings for both companies’ communications remain at 0.00

eBay Canada has at least announced that some users are suffering problems using eBay checkout, and that they are working on the problem.

Meanwhile back in the UK, a thread on the PowerSeller board is questioning if the Seller Dashboard is broken again, and based on a telephone conversation with PowerSeller Support, whether or not the calculation method for DSR scores has been significantly ammended.  The formulae reported from the telephone call certainly varies greatly from all published information, and from all explanatory and previous reassurance posts from eBay UK Pinks.

This would explain the explosion of threads and posts across the UK boards, regarding DSR score collapses since late last week.  As has happened every billing cycle since the FVF discounts were introduced, there are also a profusion of heavily subscribed posts complaining of mysterious and “convenient-for-eBay’s-bottom-line” plunges in DSR scores immediately before FVF discount calculation dates.  The entire forum-using seller community appears to be now openly posting (on eBay) that they no longer trust the company, the dashboard, or the DSR / discount scoring system.

The scale of the DSR system issues, and mistrust of eBay as a whole, appears to be far higher in the UK than in the US.  I am reminded that in this year of constant and massive disruptive changes to the eBay platform and channel, the UK is running no P.R. events such as eBay University roadshows, or their like.  This is obviously impacting communications between the company and its paying customers, and does make me wonder just how bad the relationship will get, in the USA, with no eBay Live next year?

Your thoughts appreciated, comment below.

Ed