Seller Sues eBay over Duplicate-Listings Glitch

[eBayNews]

Everyday Warehousers LLC filed a complaint against eBay Inc. in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Mississippi Jackson Division over what it called a systemic error in eBay's system that caused eBay to list duplicate items that resulted in over-billing. The complaint, filed on June 25, 2009, alleges that eBay failed to use reasonable care in billing and listing procedures and claims that Everyday Warehousers' Ralph Smith worked with eBay executives to identify the problem, and that Smith spoke to executives including then-CEO Meg Whitman about the problem.

The plaintiff claims that eBay overcharged its American Express account due to the duplicate listings, leading to problems that ultimately resulted in eBay suspending the Everyday Warehousers account and ending over five thousand of its auctions and placing subsequent limits on its account.

Everyday Warehousers claims it averaged approximately $44,000 per month in sales prior to the incidents outlined in the lawsuit, which occurred in 2007, and that the duplicate listings totaled in excess of $70,000 dollars. According to the complaint, "eBay only began to insist that duplicate listing problem was user error after Everyday Warehousers' account was suspended as described below."

eBay sellers recently complained about a duplicate-listing problem on the site, and eBay confirmed over the weekend that it was working to resolve a bug that caused its system to list some listings in duplicate and said it would credit sellers who were charged extra as a result of the bug.

[SECondplaygames]

I was reading someones thread that vic repsonded to, that mention an excess charge of $1,300 in a month. I wonder if this is the cause.

[biglouis999]

If I remember eBays precious "user agreement" says that you will hold them harmless for their own screwe ups even if they cost your business! Now this would not hold up in a British court so I doubt if it would hold up in a US one. Good luck to anyone suing greedbay over loss of revenue due to eBay screw ups. There was a whole raft of businesses in the UK and US that went down last year when they brought in this SNP policy and some sellers were sailing a bit close to the wind due to a few nasty buyers.

The problem is that eBay can afford more and better lawyers than the little guy,