eBay offers consumers compensation

Online market giant, eBay, could be forced to pay thousands of customers’ compensation after its network servers crashed, halting countless bids in the process.

According to eBay, a surge in sellers wanting to earn a few extra pounds before the Christmas holidays forced its servers to malfunction for several hours. Over 200 million items were up for sale last weekend, up 33% on last year, and as a result the site’s search function collapsed making purchases near impossible.

Due to the crash, thousands of items were sold for potentially less money than usual, and spurned distributors could launch legal action against the market Goliath.

President of eBay Marketplace, Lorrie Norrington, said: "Our immediate priority is to resolve this issue. Once that is achieved, rest assured that we will assess the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately.

"In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits for affected listings," she added.

In direct response eBay has asked any sellers who feel short-changed by the crash to re-list their items at no extra cost, while those buyers who no longer have their weekend bargain are being offered discount vouchers for the marketplace.

With total internet sales set to hit £8.9bn over the Christmas holidays, eBay will be desperately trying to repair any recent damage.

Birkett Long’s Tracey Dickens commented “eBay’s customers are fortunate that eBay are offering compensation, since it is usual for an internet provider to limit liability in the event of its service not being available, usually choosing to stipulate that they cannot guarantee service 100% of the time. However, the question will always come down to whether any such limitation is reasonable in the circumstances and of course, from a commercial perspective, there are also customer relations to consider”.

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