Thinking about starting an eBay customer support service - any advice?

I've been selling on eBay for a while now, and I noticed that a lot of my eBay seller friends have customer support problems similar to mine, even though they sell vastly different types of items. They also generally spend a lot of time and mental energy on customer support.

I figured there's gotta be a way to streamline this stuff a bit, so having a technical background, I built some basic tools (Shippo integration, some stats/reporting on the types of cases coming in, etc.) and offered to solve my friends' support cases for them for a fee.

They're pretty happy with it so far, and I'm thinking about potentially scaling up the operation and doing this for more people (which would justify building more tools). I'm wondering if you guys think this kind of service makes sense, and if so, what the particular pain points you'd like to see handled. The idea here would be that it's much higher quality support than you'd get from just outsourcing it overseas.

If you have any advice or interest in such a thing, I'd love your input!

 

I guess to start, I'd like to ask this - what sort of cases are you usually seeing? I feel like the success or viability of anything offering third-party support for a big platform like eBay is going to either have to be hugely broad or very specific, the sort of thing that eBay could handle themselves but chooses not to. I just worry that trying to offer support for someone else's platform could start getting away from you after a while since you're not going to have the same access to tools that eBay does. Of course, that isn't to say it's not worth considering!

 

Could possibly work, though it might compete with eBay's customer support already there. I am not sure about the legal aspects of it as well.

 

eBay got rid of any meaningful customer support when they split with Paypal. Literally, it's the worst, most useless, dumpster fire of customer support I have ever used, and that is truly saying something, considering I have dozens of hours of wasted chat and phone time with Time Warner and a few other bottom 10 customer support departments. eBay is in its own league of horrible.

 

I don't like ebay, I sell on ebay though and it is easy to sell. I find the whole user surface is old fashioned, cumbersome and not fun. I would first ask around what people want it the ebay forum. I hate that ebay won't print half of the addresses because they don't recognize certain towns (even Canberra) I don't like that if someone wants more than one itenm I nearly needmagmifying glasses to see it, that I don't have one screen which immediately shows me what, were when and how much...... Maybe you build a good interface which is on th top pf ebay, if that is possible. Otherwise I would like to be able not selling in ebay.

 

I'm asking sincerely because I've never actually dealt with eBay directly (as a lot of buyer/seller disputes still involve PayPal and not eBay themselves) - what was so bad about them? Were they just not able to help or answer your question, or were they really bad at whatever they were doing, or what?

 

Isn't customer support always lacking if a company gets too big?

 

Extremely poorly trained support staff and they're incapable of helping past canned scripts. There's no chance for escalation to someone who can get anything fixed, I've spent hours trying and literally higher level support doesn't exist. The most frustrating part is that they will tell you anything to get you off the phone, I think that's their only training is just to get someone off the phone, and then every time you call back in, it's a new person who needs to have the entire situation explained to them as they apparently don't track issues or make past ones available to their support staff. I literally could not design a worse experience if I tried.

Additionally, when they decoupled Paypal, any payment issues and disputes become a sort of jurisdictional crisis, where neither paypal nor ebay can or is willing to fix them. I've had issues in payments on both the selling and buying side, and they all refused to do anything, or they would assure me it would be fixed but nothing ever came of it. One time as a buyer, I actually had to convince sellers that I paid them because the paypal payments went through but the sales didn't show up in ebay. It was actually easier to convince 9 sellers that I purchased an ebay item from them that didn't show up in their ebay account than it was to get paypal to refund or ebay to post the sale in their account. In this case, the ebay sale didn't exist in mine or the seller's account, but I couldn't request a refund in paypal because it was an ebay sale. This is just 1 of dozens of times I've had issues that were completely unresolvable.

 

Holy crap, that all sounds like a nightmare! In that case I'm all for the idea of creating better customer support, but I guess my question is what you're expecting to do? What kind of access would you have to eBay's back end to solve customer's problems?