Ozymandias and ebay's Evil Process Empire

I do love buying things on ebay. Most of the time you get a good deal and the people are pretty nice. I've also sold quite a few things with similarly good experiences.

The experience sours, however, whenever I have to deal with anyone from ebay. ebay exemplify in my mind everything that is wrong with modern day businesses. When you try to contact ebay you find that there is no contact number, their e-mail address is hidden within hundreds of pages of help text and it is generally a horrible experience that screams "fix it yourself, don't contact us". When you do get a reply via e-mail it is simply a cut and paste of some generic blurb from their help text. They don't listen and they don't care.

Take my situation. I am setting up an online store for my parent's underfloor heating business. I've been trying to do this for 3 weeks now. I've filled in all the forms, jumped through hoops, finally got my paypal working and then it says that they need to call and give us a verification code to activate the business account. So we wait, and wait, and wait. A week goes by - nothing. So I try to contact ebay. Oh, but wait when I click on the help button it asks me to log in...so I do and I get to a screen which asks me for a...verification code.

So here I am unable to log in and unable to get help. The only option the screen gives me is to re-request the code - which I do for a week solid. Eventually we get a call and enter the code - hooray - it works. It then asks me to log into paypal which proceeds to crash. So I go back to ebay and log in again and....it asks me for a verification code, which I enter and...it doesn't work.

At this point I am ready to scream, but instead I write.

OK, so ebay are huge and they don't want to deal with scummy little customers. But at least design systems that allow customers to get help quickly and easily! But at the end of the day the sad fact is that ebay just don't care. As someone who runs a small business I find it really painful that companies have such low regard for the people who are paying their wages. They may be sitting on high now but like the statue of Ozymandias, the sands of change are always blowing - and when those winds change for the worse I hope that ebay will rue their appalling lack of customer focus.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

- Percey Bysshe Shelley