eBay are at last to do something that people have been asking for for years – free up some of the oldest eBay User Ids that haven’t been used for years.
eBay have sent out emails to users with dormant accounts saying “We noticed that you haven’t signed in to your eBay account for quite some time, and we’d like to invite you back to buy and sell again. eBay’s a great place to buy what you want, and sell what you have.“.
They go on to add “Unfortunately, since you haven’t used your eBay account for a while, it will be deleted if you don’t sign in within 30 days from the day this email was sent.”
I’ve never heard of eBay deleting an account before – even when eBay have closed accounts for Trust and Safety reasons the accounts and About Me pages have always remained live on the site.
What this means is that potentially some of the oldest eBay User ID’s from dormant accounts will become available to be re-registered at some time in the near future. If dormant account users don’t log in and their accounts are deleted then the User Ids could potentially become available again.
We don’t know how old the accounts are scheduled for deletion and we don’t know how long an account has to have been left unused before eBay consider it dormant and ready to be deleted. However if you have old accounts that you want to keep it’s worth signing in and possibly making a purchase on them to ensure they stay alive.
Is there a User ID that you’ve wanted for years for your business? If so you might just be able to grab it in a month or so if you still want it.
12 Responses
When you put this item together with the item about Vouchers for those with dormant ebay accounts to get them using their accounts again it makes a lot of sense. After all if a discount voucher cannot get them to start to use their ebay account again are they really worth retaining on ebay? The answer is almost certainly a resounding “NO”.
I like probably every other seller have had sales go pear shaped because of Non Payment. The Buyer has a feedback of only a handful(in some cases just 1 or 2). They have a daft name and fictious address And try as I could I could not get a response from them. In other words a fully paid up member of the Clown Brigade.
If ebay can clear out all of these from the “archives” it can only be a good thing and we should all support it and congratulate ebay for doing it. Hopefully this will become an annual clear out to stop the build up of such rubbish from the system.
Anyone happen to know if this is being done on ID’s that have been NARU’d for many years? There’s one I’ve been after for a long time that to the best of my knowledge went NARU at least 8 years ago.
Do we know what eBay defines as ‘not using your account in a while’?
Six months? Twelve months? Longer?!
Another wonderful idea would be to periodically get Buyers to confirm their email address. It seems lots of people have old email addresses attached to their accounts and then claim they never receive updates …
I thought I would save an old eBay account, however having forgot the password and not using the email anymore I am stuck in an ever lasting loop to change my password. eBay won’t do it, due to a prolonged period on inactivity. They ask me to sign in with the original password…duh…that’s the problem….
(and when I try to ring I get invalid access code..looks like I loose that account then!)
You will have to try and grab it back when it becomes “available” – though that would probably mean checking daily – depends on how desirable it’s likely to be!
Well thats cherio to approx forty of mine that havent been used in years
Am I just being simple? When ever I am devising a Password or indeed changing a PIN number I always go for something that means something to me. I know that st georges dragon will not like me saying this but PIN numbers are 4 digit and so are Great Western Railway Locomotive Numbers. So I just pick a particular loco’s number. Similarly with a Password I base it on a loco name plus number. So it is unlikely that I could ever forget it.
Now that technique could be adjusted for those who are not powered by steam. As an example PIN numbers. Last 4 digits from a phone number or if you had a service number(everybody who has ever been in the Army will always remember their service number many years after leaving the services) or staff number from work 4 digits from that. It does not have to be the last 4 digits. It could be the first 4 or even the odd numbers so the first,third, fifth, 7th of your service number or from a phone number.
With passwords again a combination of words and numbers that mean something to you rather than just random. Obviously I will not tell you mine but they are ones that mean something to me. So short of a major head wound I am likely always to remember them or if I forgot then it should not take me long to find it again.
The Banks are always telling us not to note down our PIN numbers and I suppose the same goes for Passwords. But at least if they mean something to us they should never be forgotten.