eBay Giving Out Coupons and Other Compensation after Website Crash

Posted 11/24/2009 at 9:12am | by Paul Lilly

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Auction site eBay went down for several hours on Saturday, causing sellers to lose sales, as well as potentially selling items for a lower bid than they might have otherwise received had the site remained running. Oops!

eBay says it has since fixed the software SNAFU that caused all the ruckus and promises this was a one-time deal, but that doesn't rectify the situation for sellers who were affected by the outage. To make things right, eBay said it plans on compensating vendors in several different ways.

"To minimize the impact, we'e working to ensure that sellers and buyers whose transactions were affected by the disruptions will be made as whole as possible," said president Lorrie Norrington. "This includes listing fee refunds and protection against negative or neutral buyer feedback as well as detailed seller ratings (DSRs) lower than five starts for impacted sellers, and coupons for buyers of items that were impacted by the disruption."

According to eBay, the surge of holiday shoppers caught the site off guard, which led to the crash.