eBay FAQ

Yes, no, not really! eBay are notoriously hard to contact, should you ever need to - it sometimes seems like they expect the site to run itself.

You can email them, as long as you don't have your heart set on a coherent response, if you go to:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/
contact_us/_base/index.html

You might have better luck in a 'live help' webchat here:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/basics/n-livehelp.html

Only eBay Power Sellers get to phone customer service.

If you really want to try your luck, type 'ebay [your country] phone number' into a search engine and you'll probably find something.

Unfortunately, the chances are you'll have gone to all that trouble for the joy of leaving an answerphone message!

It might seem cruel, but imagine the number of people who would call eBay every day with the dumbest questions if they gave out their phone number everywhere!

This email asks for your password, right?

It's a scam! It's an attempt to frighten you, make you give up your details and then steal your account.

eBay will never ask for your password or any other account details by email.

eBay say that you should only ever enter your password on pages that whose addresses start with http://signin.ebay.com

They even offer a special Account Guard as part of their toolbar, which lets you check that you're not giving your password to a fake site.

You can read more about Account Guard here:

http://pages.ebay.com/toolbar/accountguard_1.html

For you, the buyer, eBay is free.

Sellers, though, pay all sorts of fees: a listing fee for each item they list, a final value fee (a percentage of what the item sold for).

They can they pay optional fees for extra services, including Buy it Now, extra pictures, reserve prices, highlighting the auction, putting it in bold, listing it first in search results or even putting it on the front page.

You can see a full list of fees at:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html

It's obviously worth it to the sellers, though, or they wouldn't carry on using eBay.

The system is quite efficient, and basically forces both eBay and the sellers to keep their profit margins as low as possible - otherwise prices will simply go too high and the buyers will stop buying.

Well, as it happens, that's the subject of our next email! All of eBay's safety services for buyers and sellers are in one place, called 'SafeHarbor'.

SafeHarbor handles fraud prevention and investigation, helps with dispute resolution and keeps rule-breakers in check.

Read all about it by clicking here and be safe :-)