I sold some stuff on eBay for the first time. When I received the bill, I signed up for it to be paid automatically via my PayPal account. Life’s great, eh?

Not so fast. A month later, eBay hits me with late fees and puts my eBay account on hold. Turns out, they didn’t debit PayPal automatically as I’d asked them to. Instead, I was supposed to divine that auto-pay works only for invoices received after auto-pay is set up.

You might say that is predictable. In fact, that is how my bank works. When I sign up for e-bills or auto-pay, my bank warns that it might not kick in right away and that I should pay manually for the next billing cycle.

So here is my defense:

eBay and PayPal are part of the same company. Someone should be able to figure this out.

Not convinced? Fine, either was I. So when I first signed up for auto-pay, I asked eBay customer service when my account would be debited. They said it would happen in 5 or 10 days. They mentioned nothing about it *not* happening in the first billing cycle. Obviously, I was asking about that because people who had been using the service for more than a month wouldn’t be asking the question!

Still not convinced? Fine, you’re a skeptic. So am I. So when I didn’t notice a debit (shortly before the payment was due–30 days after the invoice was sent), I again contacted customer support at eBay. Should I pay manually, I asked? No, they said, that would just result in a double payment and confuse everyone.

Okay, so I’m a lunatic raging against the machine, right? No, nothing of the sort. I calmly contacted customer service, asked them to remove the late fee and reinstate my account. Everyone makes mistakes, and they were entitled to a second chance.

Instead, they gave me the runaround through 10 emails, refusing to credit (drum roll please….) 8 cents! They insisted that because I wouldn’t accept blame for their systems’ limitations that I somehow did not understand them. The coup de grace (sp?) was their customer service rep (ironically named “Grace”) chastising me to make sure I wouldn’t let this happen again in the future.

So to summarize, eBay customer service sucks even worse than their software.

Can anyone recommend a better auction site with a liquid market in BrixWear T-shirts?

Give me your eBay horror stories.