EBay hikes its fees for sellers just as traders vent fury after website crashes for tenth time this year
- Hundreds of thousands of users were unable to log on or trade on the site
- Outage thought to be caused by crucial ‘nuts and bolts’ of the internet called the Border Gateway Protocol
- Fees for sellers are going up from today - including for 'buy it now' feature
EBay users have been venting their fury after the website crashed for the tenth time this year – in the same week that it hiked its prices for sellers.
The online auctioneer was out of action for most of the day on Tuesday, with buyers and sellers inundating the site with complaints about lost business after being unable to log onto their accounts.
Hundreds of thousands of users were unable to log on and the auction site was flooded with traders demanding compensation.
Changing its prices: eBay is revising its fees, which will lead to increased costs for some users
Traders are calling for compensation for loss of sales, while others have complained that they had auctions due to finish at the time of the outage meaning that they would lose out on the best bids.
Paul Lowndes tweeted eBay UK: ‘I have items I’m selling that finish tonight, most of my bids come in on the last day, is there going to be any compensation?’
Meanwhile users such as Andy Turner tweeted: ‘I’m looking forward to the compensation you are going to pay me for all this lost business! SORT IT OUT EBAY!’
To angry eBay users, @eBay_UK responded: ‘We are investigating reports some customers are having trouble accessing eBay. We will update as soon as we have more information. Thank you’.
The outage on Tuesday marked an unfortunate prelude to eBay’s new pricing rules, which see selling on eBay get more expensive from today.
The changes will see those who use the site for auctions for three-to-ten day ‘buy it now listings’ in particular, although some will see costs drop slightly.
eBay sellers will now be charged £2.50 – formerly 95p – to use the website’s ‘gallery plus’ feature, which allows users to display their images larger on auctions and ‘buy it now’ listings’.
Adding a ‘buy it now’ option to auctions will cost a flat rate of 50p from today. Until now, the fee varied according to the price of the item being sold. Adding the option to items listed between 99p and £4.99 cost 10p, between £5 and £14.99 cost 20p and between £15 and £24.99 cost 30p. Items costing anything above £25 already cost 50p to add the option.
It is thought the latest eBay outage, which left millions of online users with difficulties accessing websites, was caused by the crucial ‘nuts and bolts’ of the internet – called the Border Gateway Protocol.
Online breakdowns of this kind could become a regular occurrence for website users because the internet is running out of space, experts have warned.
The breakdown on Tuesday cost the economy millions of pounds in lost trade and effectively closed access to a number of huge websites.
Internet companies and large networks use this ‘route map’ - consisting of hundreds of thousands of complex paths through the web - to send information to each other.
When visiting a website, users rely on machines called routers to remember how to navigate trusted routes through the ever-expanding internet.
But older routers are finding it difficult to manage with newer technology – such as smartphones and tablets which have drastically increased the number of people online and the time spent online.
Growing market: Increasing numbers of Ebay users are logging on from their smartphones and tablets
They have imposed a huge volume of extra traffic onto the web, leaving some routers struggling with lack of memory and processing power.
Some machines impose an arbitrary upper limit of 512,000 different routes, a number that experts say is out of date.
The system is similar to the human brain being unable to cope with remembering ‘all the back streets’ on a long car journey, said Dr Joss Wright, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.
In order to deal with the increase in web traffic, routers need to be updated with more memory and processing power.
Yet experts said some machines are starting to become badly dated.
The outages are not the first bit of ill fortune faced by eBay this year.
In May it was revealed that millions of eBay users had their details stolen by hackers, following the biggest criminal raid ever carried out online.
Facing price rises: Million of users may have to pay more for upgrading their listing on eBay
The personal details of 15million users in the UK were compromised following the data hack, which was now many months ago but only revealed in May.
eBay warned all users to urgently change their passwords to protect their details.
A spokesperson for eBay said: 'Some of our customers experienced problems accessing eBay in Europe on Tuesday morning. Our technical experts identified this was due to upstream Internet Service Provider (ISP) issues and restored access as quickly as possible.
'During the window where sellers could have been impacted by the technical issues, we will help sellers by ensuring they are not held responsible for any delays in shipping items, and allow them to choose to cancel any auction sales without penalty.'
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