Complaint Review: EBAY

We have been and EBAY seller for 4 years. Never really using it much until march2011.Then we started listing hundreds of various items with good results.While surfing my EBAY site one night attempting to learn more about how the site worked ,I accidentally clicked on an upgrade button. There are 3 different seller catagories or stores . Basic, premium and Anchor. Basic costs you .25 cents per listing and is free. Premium is $50.00 a month and costs .05 cents to list,and comes with numerous other perks. Anchor store $299.95 per month and .03 cents per listing and even more perks.Ebay also charges a final value fee for the total sales price and a final value fee for the shipping and handling ,amounting to about 12.5% of the total sale.Paypal also takes a fee of about 10%. So you are paying approximately 25% in commissions when you sell an item.   We owned a premium store at the time. I hit the upgrade button expecting to find out more information about and Anchor store. But instead of information it automatically upgraded me to an anchor store without a confirmation button.I was instantly charged $512.00 for a partial month of May and full month of June. Realizing what had happened I changed it back to a premium store. Ebay records show we had an anchor store for a total of 3 minutes.I called EBAY when I found out we had been charged $512.00 for the anchor store plus our regular premium store fees because I down graded again. EBAY said we were liable to pay this amount and a credit would be issued on the next billing statement.It was computer generated bill and there was nothing EBAY could do to reverse the charges.They would not issue a credit . It took a hundred plus phone calls and dozens of chat sessions and over 3 months to finally have the anchor store fees reversed.Each time getting a person on the line that had no clue what was going on. They are trained to give you prewritten answers to generalized questions. 4 times our request was submitted to a billing specialist and denied. Eventually they started crediting partial refund of the total amount. In the interim they charged us interest and late fees on this balance and Suspended our account .This happened on May 10,2011 and the final credit was issued on August 4,2011.After which they closed our store.Ebay does not have  a number to call or a person in a supervisory position that you can speak to. Many times the EBAY employee would disconnect the call when you asked to speak with a supervisor.There is no link or address made publicly known where you can make a complaint  only generalized answers.After finally speaking to 2 supervisors we got the anchor store reversed.And while reviewing our account they found over $171.00 in fees that we were overcharged. After closing our store they charged us for relisting fees for our 640 items and a premium store fee which took us several more phone calls to get the $121.00 in fees reversed.I tried to make a complaint to New York State Attorney Generals office. Since we owned a store we are considered a business and the attorney generals office only deals with consumer complaints.EBAY states that each time you contact them you will receive a copy of the chat session all you receive is a note saying that you had a chat session with no record of the session . You can only get a copy of the chat sessions by requesting it.A few other notes worth mentioning here. When you attempt to change the shipping calculator it automatically reverts to the previous or same price as intitially entered unless you enter the information twice. They allow people who do not successfully purchase and item to leave feedback usually negative. Example we had one item that was damaged before shipment and had to cancel the transaction,this person was so upset they left negative feeedback. Buyers are allowed to leave feedback based on:
 item as described
Communication
Shipping time
Shipping and handling charges
 The first three on this feedback form are opinionated answers and have relevance. But the fourth ,the Shipping and Handling has no relevance or opinion as the buyers know in advance ,when researching or completing the transaction what the shipping price is going to be. If they do not like the price for shipping and handling shop elsewhere. If you look on EBAY you will see thousand of items sell for .99 cents and will charge shipping according to actual value of the item.( Example Dish for >99 cents but shipping and handling is $19.95 ,actual shipping is $5.00 and they pocket the rest)Feed back is used to evaluate a store. We sold over 400 items in three months time excellent ratings on all . We had 6 negative feedbacks on for shipping and handling on our detailed seller rating for shipping and handling. All others were above standard.This closed our store down and we are unable to have store for 1 year,being forced to list, if we want to for .25 cents per item versus a nickel . No access to customer support chat and many other perks are denied. Many advantages to having a store is so you advertise it and put it on the web. Basic does not allow you to do this,only list with searches made on the EBAY site being sent to you.If you receive more than 3 negative Detailed seller feedbacks in a years time your account will be closed or considered below standard.My thoughts are beware EBAY is looking to fill there bottom line and does not assist the seller in any way . They do not credit your account properly for credits that are due unless you research each transaction to see the proper cradits were issued . The site is not easy to navigate and the commissions are getting to be outrageous,as much as 25% for final value fees.Even charging commissions on US GOVERMENT POSTAGE NOW.The staff available is uneducated in assiting you with a real problem and people that do know how to handle a problem are unaccessible.By the time we were down with this fiasco I had spent hundreds of hours online in chats and on the phone and we recieved over $700.00 in credits that went unnoticed because we had sold so many items in a short period of time,being scammed from us pennies at a time. The billing invoice is set up as such no reasonable person would consider checking it if you are moving hundreds of item as it all supposed to be done by computer and they do not make mistakes  as quoted by several employees. BEWARE!