eBay have sent out thousands of email vouchers for between £20 and £75. The email which thanks users for their patience during the password reset will doubtless be welcome to buyers and sellers alike. Even if as a seller you didn’t receive one, some one may well have spent their voucher buying from you over the past few days.
I received my email 24 hours after eBay displaying the voucher value (£20 in my case) on all listings and despite the difficulties in using it until the instructions arrived it was very welcome. Hopefully most eBay users are checking their email accounts as otherwise they won’t get the message – it was sent via email only and not copied into user’s eBay My Messages inbox.
Whilst the email doesn’t exactly say “sorry”, it certainly conveys the message that eBay appreciate it wasn’t their best day’s business and that it was a pain for users to have to reset their passwords.
It’s difficult to estimate the cost of the vouchers to eBay as we have no way of knowing how many they have given out, what the value of each voucher is and how many countries the vouchers are going out in. Suffice to say it’s a fair amount as 1000’s of users appear to have received them. Still, eBay make plenty of cash so it won’t break the bank and plus, being the end of the quarter, many will have spent their vouchers this weekend so it should put a nice bump into eBay’s numbers for investors.
At the end of the day it’s great to see eBay proactively encouraging (or even dare I say it bribing!) buyers to make a purchase. If people haven’t reset their password yet this should certainly encourage them to do so and if they’ve been reluctant to use eBay the thought of some free cash to spend will probably persuade them otherwise – it’s hard not to spend £20 – £75 and if you pick an item with free postage you’ll not have to spend a penny of your own money to do so.
For those that didn’t receive a voucher and so probably not the email here’s the full text:
Thank you for your patience during the recent password reset issue.
As a valued customer we know you wanted us to fix this issue straight away, and since day one we have been working hard to do just that:
• Once we learned customers’ data was impacted, we immediately began notifying customers through email and news alerts, although sending millions of emails did take some time.
• We re-engineered large sections of our site within days to allow all our customers to securely reset their password whilst keeping eBay running. Unfortunately, the size of this task meant that some customers experienced delays completing their reset.
• Our customer service teams have been working hard to help users. Call volumes were up significantly so we pulled in all of our teams to help, although some customers still experienced longer-than-usual wait times when calling in.
This disruption is not what people should expect from eBay. As a measure of our appreciation for your continued loyalty, we’ve included a voucher below to spend on whatever you would like on eBay.
We hope you enjoy spending this voucher which we’ve tried to make as easy as possible to use: all you need to do is to sign into eBay from the account this email is addressed to, pay with PayPal, and use the voucher code below during checkout.
11 Responses
Seemingly a random token, given that many affected badly by the password received nothing.
Ebay’s customer relations is so lacking that they are managing to alienate even their most loyal supporters.
Today’s print ads were astoundingly poor too. I fear anything they do now may be too little too late, for sellers still relying on them I hope I’m wrong.
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Got a £20 voucher on an account that I hardly use, maybe we should check those accounts.
Was going to use it today, but my purchase is a cash on collection, so pretty useless..
3 accounts and not 1 voucher to any of them 🙁
Pah!
Yes, we also have 3 accounts, but no voucher. And with eBay being so dead this weekend and today, I wonder if anyone got one 🙂
Thanks ebay for the £75 voucher – bought my sons £70 birthday present with it 🙂
None on four active Ebay accounts. 🙁
This is a physiological dodge by ebay. Am sorry but even after spending my voucher of £20 It couldn’t change my mind about ebay.
I hope eBay is passing the cost of this vouchering exercise onto SAP. It was their SAP database that got so easily hacked, and it’s no more secure today than it was on the day of the attack. The bad guys will be back…. 🙁
we received a voucher on one account, not on our other.
one of my colleagues was on the phone to eBay already, and queried the why of it….
they were told “it has absolutely nothing to do with the hack, its a promotional exercise and people are picked at random…”
complete nonsense. wish eBay could just stop lying to us for ten minutes. the email says its an apology for the hack, their CS staff say its nothing to do with the hack, yet again at least one half of eBay is telling lies. way to build trust at this time guys!