The week of March 3rd marked the 5th Anniversary of the eBay Vancouver Customer Support center. Since its humble beginnings with a handful of employees in March of 2003, the center has grown exponentially and now proudly provides 24/7 support to eBay members around the world!
The week was filled with a number of celebrations for the Vancouver employees, but the highlight for everyone was a two-day visit from "Uncle Griff"! As many of you know, Griff was eBay's FIRST Customer Support Representative, and he is adored by eBay members and eBay employees alike. The Vancouver employees were thrilled to welcome Griff to Vancouver and they enjoyed tapping into his rich history in Customer Support and hearing his great words of wisdom. Those of you who know Griff also know that he is a barrel of laughs - we've had a lot of good chuckles during his visit :-)
Griff, thank you for coming to visit us all in Vancouver, and..... HAPPY BIRTHDAY VANCOUVER!
Here are a few photos from the week:
(Clockwise starting with photo on top with moose: Baywinkle Moose with some Customer Support reps, Griff with some Trust & Safety reps, Griff & yours truly, Julie Drossos, Trust & Safety team celebrates 5 years, and finally, Baywinkle Moose with French-Canada rep, Vincent.)
Remember that Seinfeld episode where George concocts a fake charity, in order to wriggle out of buying holiday gifts for his co-workers? Instead of buying them gifts he claims that a donation has been made in their name to "The Human Fund" (with the slogan "Money for People"). The holiday season and the first few weeks of the new year might bring out the best in most people, but for fraudsters, it's a time to bring out their worst scams.
One such scam eBay members should watch out for is an offer to buy or sell listed items outside of the eBay website (instead of buying "on-eBay," which means bidding on or buying the item on eBay, and then paying through the eBay Checkout process). Going outside of eBay to buy or sell an item listed on eBay is worse than falling for an old, legendary scam like "Psst! Wanna buy the Brooklyn Bridge?" It's like going down a dark alley to settle the transaction with your buyer or seller. You might find your money or item taken, with nothing to show in return. It's an unsafe and unprotected way of doing business.
On the other hand, completing the transaction on eBay (and with PayPal) is safe, because eBay has many buyer and seller protection programs, such as the Purchase Protection programs and Seller Protection programs to protect you if something goes wrong.
Fraudsters will attempt to lure you off the eBay site with Fake Second Chance Offers Recently one of our members (let's call him Robert) recently bid on an item that he really wanted, but didn't win. Shortly after the listing ended, he received an email in his personal email inbox that looked something like this:
"I am the seller of the item you recently placed a bid on: Hoover SteamVac F7425-900 Shampooer Steamer. The winner got rejected due to security reasons. Your last bid price is taken into consideration. If you are interested to buy it please email me at myemailaddress@aol.com and include your name, address and eBay ID. Please contact me at myemailaddress@aol.com with your response, either yes or no."
It seemed too good to be true, but Robert contacted the "seller" anyway. Robert thanked him, stated that he did still want the steamer and agreed to pay using the "seller's" preferred payment method, Western Union. He sent him $185 through Western Union.
You can guess where this story is going. Robert didn't get the steamer, and ended up losing his money.
Another common method a fraudster might use to lure people "off-eBay" is by including an email address in their listing, telling buyers to contact them directly for a "better deal."
If you're faced with a situation like Robert's here are some tips to avoid the errors of judgment that he made:
Do not use Western Union for eBay items. You will NOT be protected. Western Union is not an accepted payment method on eBay because it is unsafe when paying someone you don't know.
Check out a really creative page our friends in eBay Australia have come up with for tips on how to spot fraudsters using Western Union to lure you into an unsafe transaction.
Ask Seller a Question – Sellers, beware of buyers asking you to contact them about a transaction at a personal email address instead of using the Ask Seller a Question feature.
Report off-eBay offers to us – Lastly, if you receive an offer to to buy or sell a listed item outside of eBay, let us know about it! Here's how to contact us to:
Confirm all Second Chance Offers in My Messages – In fact, make sure you check My Messages for ALL communications from your buyer or seller. If it's a genuine email, you should see a copy of it in My Messages.
Lastly I encourage you to take the Buying Safely tutorial and spend some time in our newly revamped Security Center. There are some great tips in there for both new and experienced buyers alike.
I wanted to introduce you to another employee here at our Vancouver office with a fun collection. Laura works in our Billing Department, and she is a passionate collector of Carebears!
Check out this video to watch Laura show off some of the most cherished carebears she has displayed at her desk (she has over 72 and has lost count), including her rare vintage "Seacrest Bear" from the UK, as well as her "America Cares" bear.
Greetings from the eBay Vancouver office. Here in Vancouver, the vast majority of our employees are active on the eBay site, and like many of you, many of our employees have become big collectors.
I'd like to introduce you to Trevor Wong. Trevor works in our Trust & Safety Department. In his spare time, he is a big collector... of Nike Shoes! Watch the video below to view (part of) his collection, and to learn how he waited about a year and a half to find a pair of shoes that was in just the right condition and for the right price. He finally won it after what he calls "a gruelling auction." Way to shop victoriously, Trevor!
As the guy in charge of Trust & Safety messaging, you might say my job is an uphill battle. Safety messages are, to be blunt, boring. (This is also one of the reasons why we're making our Security Center friendlier and more inviting.)
Most serious content on the vitally important subject of password security (including eBay's Help page, I'll admit) reads like mom's admonishment to "eat your vegetables" or "clean up your room." We roll our eyes and inwardly groan, "Not another litany about passwords...I know, mom! I KNOW!!"
We often feel like the messages are for someone else. We might even feel a bit patronized by them. "Of COURSE I use strong passwords, duh! My passwords are NOT my birthday, my pet's name, my favorite sports team, or the word 'password123,' so what could possibly go wrong?" we say.
Well, plenty.
We can thank the University of Wyoming for taking the subject of password security out of the realm of broccoli and room cleaning. Evidently someone there knows how to grab the attention of the notoriously capricious student mind. Heck, introduce underwear into the conversation – that time-honored, giggle-inducing topic we learn to love in kindergarten – and you make even the most apathetic of users sit up and read. We all are kids at heart, after all.
How fast can someone guess your password? We all know that the bad guys behind phishing and identity theft scams are out to steal our passwords, but thinking that they're hunched over their computers trying out different combinations manually to arrive at our passwords is wrong.
These crooks write software programs that can "guess" passwords far more easily and quickly than you might think. Even desktop personal computers have now become powerful enough that they can process 100,000 encryption operations per second. And here's a sobering statistic: according to the University of Wyoming, if your password has 5 characters and uses only lower-case letters, it can be cracked in under 2 minutes. If it's 6 characters, it takes a bit longer, but it can still be cracked in under an hour!
The good news is that the longer and more complex your password is, the harder it gets for these rogue software programs to even come close to cracking it.
For instance, if you have an 8-character password that uses a combination of upper and lower case, it will take 17 years of computer processing to crack that password. If you add just one more character to your password, you're significantly upping the ante – the University of Wyoming says that it will take over 800 years to crack a 9 character password made up of upper and lower case letters. And if you throw numerals into the mix as well, the rogue programs will have to grind away even longer.
Is your password strong?
eBay has technology that detects whether your password is "strong" or not. If you have a password that our technology identifies as prone to being cracked by known patterns used by password-guessing tools, we present an additional layer of authentication to prevent your password from being broken. Remember how sometimes you see a combination of squiggly letters and numbers when you're signing in to your account? A password-guessing program can't recognize those characters, but a person – i.e. you – can. Despite this additional layer of protection, I'd still say that everyone should change their passwords often, at least every 30 to 60 days.
So here are some tips I urge you to use:
Read the University of Wyoming page and chuckle over the underwear references (or frown and say "Tsk! tsk!", if you're a mom).
Carefully read the serious information about creating a strong password.
I'm John McDonald from eBay's Trust & Safety team. With the biggest shopping season of the year right around the corner, it's more important than ever that internet users – on eBay and off – stay safe when they're on the internet.
I'll be blogging here every couple weeks with important safety tips, as well as news about advances we're making at eBay and PayPal to help the marketplace stay safe.
Feel free to share my blog posts with your friends and family – safety is everybody’s business, so spread the word!
This week, I'd like to share some positive developments with you related to Phishing emails and also bring you up to date with what we're doing to keep eBay buyers and sellers well-informed about the recent spate of product recalls.
1) eBay, PayPal and Yahoo! are partnering to reduce dangerous Phishing emails
eBay, PayPal and Yahoo! have joined forces to reduce the number of phishing emails that eBay and PayPal members get. All emails from eBay and PayPal have a digital signature (a bit of code that spammers can’t replicate). Yahoo! Mail will now check all emails claiming to come from eBay or PayPal for this digital signature. If you use Yahoo! Mail for your eBay or PayPal activity, you will receive only genuine email from eBay and PayPal in your inbox, because authentic emails will have the correct digital signature. However, a phishing email that is pretending to be from eBay won't have the digital signature, and so Yahoo! Mail will automatically prevent it from reaching your inbox. This is a huge victory in the ongoing battle against phishing.
For now, this effort will help only our members who use Yahoo! Mail, although we hope to form similar partnerships with additional ISPs in the future. (Read more about this project on PayPal's blog. )
Speaking of phishing emails, remember these important safety tips:
Please -- don't get Phished! An email from your bank, PayPal, eBay or another institution that asks for you contact information or for your immediate response is fishy – or possibly PHISHY! Here are some steps to take:
Stop. Don't rush to reply or take action – even if the request is really urgent sounding.
Look. Read the text several times, and ask yourself why this information or call to action is necessary.
Check. Check My Messages for an eBay email, or contact PayPal customer support.
Forward. Forward any suspicious emails to us at spoof@ebay.com and spoof@PayPal.com.
2) Shopping safely – Toy Recalls If you read our General Announcement Board regularly, you've noticed a number of U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recalls lately. We want to make sure our Community stays safe, and doesn't buy or sell items that could pose a health or safety hazard. As a service to our Community, we announce toy recalls or major recalls that could affect to buyers and sellers.
One way we're working to increase our Community's awareness about eBay's Recalled Items policy is by including links on various product category pages, such as Toys & Hobbies and Baby. You can see a bunch of helpful resources on the bottom right of the category page, under "Category Community Links." We provide notices to sellers when they are listing items that may be part of a major recall. We also have links to the Recalled Items policy and other resources on the Toy & Hobbies Discussion board.
Finally, our Security and Resolution Center (which you can find at the bottom of most eBay pages) also has one-click access to the CPSC, making it easy to get helpful safety tips directly from the CPSC. On the CPSC site, consumers can also access a searchable database of recalled products, and sign up to receive email notifications of newly recalled products.
That's it for now. Until next time, Shop Victoriously – and Safely!!
The eBay employees at our Vancouver Customer Support centre work 24/7 to support eBay members around the world in a number of areas. In order to give them a break and the chance to have a little fun now and then, we like to get a little creative. One annual event that is a crowd pleaser year after year for the Vancouver employees is our very own EBAYZING RACE!
No doubt you've heard of the popular reality TV show, The Amazing Race. Well, the eBayzing Race is basically a quirkier and more environmentally-friendly version of the hit show. This year was our third annual eBayzing Race and it has been touted as the biggest and best ever. Over 100 eBay employees clad in their brightest and best eBay colours raced against the clock to complete challenges throughout the city of Vancouver. Employees used environmentlaly-friendly modes of transportation to get around - they walked, ran, cycled and took public transportation all over the city in order to complete their tasks.
Along the way they were faced with 5 "roadblocks" at which they had to do everything from eat a lemon meringue pie with no utensils, play an impossible game of downhill bocce ball, make their way down a gigantic yellow waterslide, and much more. As you can imagine, things got pretty wild!
Hi Everyone, sorry it’s been so long since I’ve last blogged. I’ve been pretty busy here in Vancouver and I’ve finally gotten back on track since the excitement and energy of eBay Live! in Boston. By the way, It was great meeting many of you in Boston. It was fun to meet some of you that had read a few of my blogs, face to face! Today I’m going to spotlight an employee here at our Vancouver Customer Support office – Jason Luu. Jason has a very unique job, we call him our “Spoof Ninja”. I sat down with Jason last week and interviewed him. He was thrilled, and very honored, to get to share a little bit about what he does with our loyal Chatter readers. Enjoy!
Julie Drossos: How long have worked for eBay?
Jason Luu: Wow! I was bamboozled when I checked my work records here, according to them, I've been here for roughly 1158 days (that’s roughly 3 years and 2 months). The root of my amazement isn't that I'm surprised to have been gainfully employed here for such a solid amount of time. On the contrary, it's more to do with the fact that it doesn't feel that I've been here for that long. The constant challenges presented to us here along with the rewards that come from meeting those challenges, really make every day here seem like a new day. Interestingly enough, according to those same records, it says that I'm a great performer and admired by many, so those records could have been tampered with.
JD: What areas have you worked in?
JL: I have had a very colorful career so far at eBay, having been introduced to many different work groups and fortunate enough to be involved in several important projects. I've been involved in Reactive Fraud, Spam/Spoof, Account Security, and, of course, Spoof Handling. Before working in the area I’m currently in (which is a job I LOVE), I have to say that my favorite department to date has been working in Account Security. It was like a roller coaster ride that never ended. Every day was interesting.
JD: What is your job/role currently and what exactly does it entail?
JL: My current role at eBay is that of a Spoof Ninja (more formally known as a Spoof Handler)! You might be thinking that that sounds pretty crazy. And you'd be right! The governing principle behind my job is simple: to diligently protect you, our members, from phishing sites and maintain the integrity of the eBay site. The existence of phishing sites and fraudulent listings that manipulate users to visit a phishing site are serious issues. We treat such issues with a great deal of urgency. We play an instrumental role in monitoring phishing site trends and, by working very closely with ISPs and networks globally, getting these sites off the grid. It's a Ninja thing.
Perhaps no post is as fitting for Friday the 13th as this one. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, many of our SLC employees were avid eBay users long before they decided to join the company in an official capacity. One of these early eBayers, and now a member of the eBay Trust and Safety Account Management team, is Brandon Fox. Brandon discovered eBay early in 1999. At the time, like many of our Community, he had a niche business (for Brandon, an amazing talent for bringing the creepy to life) and was looking for the best way to get his product out there. He had contacted local retailers and even considered creating his own catalog. Luckily, he had just heard the buzz about eBay and decided to give it a try. Eight years later and his business is going strong. There he is to the right, working on one of his many creations.
eBay turned out to be the perfect fit for Brandon (eBay User ID: silentcreations) as he specializes in creating, ummm, unique, hand crafted, one of a kind items — “horror and oddities” in his own words. Things that you hope never haunt your worst nightmares (although the pictures of his creations below might). But for Brandon, the more terrifying the better.
“There was nothing like making that first sale. The first time you sell something it is the best feeling, the best win-dorphin. After that, I was hooked.”
So hooked in fact that Brandon jumped at the opportunity to join eBay in November of 2002 as a member of the Customer Support team. With his experience on eBay, Brandon has been able to help out a variety of other eBayers over the years in his Customer Support role.
Brandon definitely keeps busy. With his work at eBay assisting other Community members, as well as his efforts trying to keep his store stocked with severed limbs, skeletal remains, and rotting flesh, Brandon knows all to well that Halloween is only 7 short months away.
eBay held its second Certified Provider Fair at the eBay Customer Support center in Salt Lake City, UT, on Wednesday, March 14th. The purpose of these events is to expose Customer Support employees at eBay to the software and services available to the eBay Community from developers who have qualified to become eBay Certified Providers.
Over 300 eBay employees attended, including Top Seller Account Managers, Seller Outreach and OnRamp Business Consultants, PowerSeller Stores Support, ProStores Pre-Sales, Motors, Half.com, Listing Tools, and even our Trust and Safety teams. These teams are on the phone every day helping eBay sellers grow their businesses. Saving time and increasing profits is key to the success of every seller, so helping to pair the right solution with the right seller is vital.
Feedback from the eBay teams has been extremely positive. “The CPs were especially helpful, and I have already sent some of my sellers their way,” said David Wallentine, Top Seller Account Manager.
They were amazed at the range of software and services available, including product sourcing, accounting and business management, listing strategy consulting, and research solutions. Brian Grow from eBay Seller Onramp had this to say, “I especially enjoyed meeting Certified Providers that I hadn’t previously heard of like JDT and Palo Alto. Now that I know more about their products I’ll be better able to advise the growing eBay business owners I talk to every day.”
Certified Providers just as thrilled to meet directly with these key influencers. “I'm sure both the vendors and the eBay attendees will all agree that the value created for everyone was immeasurable....” said Tobe Goldfinger from JDT Technologies, “including the trickle-down value for all those eBay sellers who will now be able get really useful information from their eBay contacts about what kind of solutions are available.”
“I was really pleased at the turn out and the response from the people who came into our little room. I thought everyone was really receptive and excited about what our software could do for their clients, which is always fantastic to hear,” shared Chelle Parmele, Palo Alto Software.
Fourteen Certified Providers were onsite to showcase their solutions, including:
It’s been awhile so I wanted to stop in and say hi from the Vancouver Customer Support office. I'm also here to share a story about Darrin, a Supervisor on the graveyard shift that works for eBay here in Vancouver. He has an inspiring story about facing obstacles and overcoming them - and how he's using eBay to do so.
Last August, Darrin was diagnosed with Diabetes, and consequently underwent surgery due to complications of the disease. Although he will make a strong recovery, the healing process has been very slow. He misses the days of keeping busy helping out the eBay Community from his job in Vancouver. (That’s Darrin pictured here with his wife Lindsay and daughter Parker.)
Confined to his bed, he told me how he was going stir-crazy from not being able to work or communicate with friends other than by phone. He decided to purchase a laptop, and got back to two of his favourite things – music and eBay. Soon after, he resurrected his music website www.rocksquad.net. On Rocksquad, he interviews mainstream multiplatinum artists from the Black Label Society, to Steve Vai, to the Dropkick Murphys. The cool part of the site – aside from the fact that Darrin does everything from the artwork, the interviews and CD reviews – is the Rock Auction. Over the coming weeks, Darrin will be auctioning off a number of items for charity. The auction items have been donated by various musicians, artists and instrument companies, in support of the Diabetes Association of Canada as well as Jason Becker, a talented guitar player who was unfortunately stricken with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
All of Darrin’s auctions will be run on eBay and payable by PayPal (unfortunately eBay Giving Works isn't available in Canada to simplify the process). Some auction items coming up are a guitar from the Black Label Society, signed by everyone on the Ozzfest Tour ’06 (including Ozzy himself!), a “Coffin Case” guitar case signed by the Misfits, autographed photos of 2007 Grammy nominee Tommy Emmanuel, and tons of signed DVDs and CDs.
He's also passing the time by pursuing another life long passion – taking guitar lessons. In order to do this, he gets his lessons via Skype Video from Dave Weiner, Favored Nations recording artist and 8-year member of the Steve Vai band! But while Darrin is making the most of his time as he recovers at home, he says he cannot wait to get back to work, and have everything back to normal. Rock on, Darrin!
If you know of an inspirational story such as Darrin's and would like to see it featured in the Chatter, send us a note at chatterblog@ebay.com.
One of the great things about working at eBay is that the employees are such avid users and participants in the member community, whether it be eBay, PayPal, or Skype. A recent example involved one of our Salt Lake City employees, Dale Hansen, who has been serving a military assignment in Iraq and Kuwait. A few months into his military deployment his wife delivered a baby boy. The great news is the baby is healthy and is doing great. What makes this story even a bit happier is Dale was able to attend the birth from Kuwait via Skype Video.
I’ll let Dale share his experience in his own words via a message he sent to the employees in Salt Lake City.
I have great news! Abby gave birth to Benjamin Dale Hansen November 29th at 10:12 am and both are doing fine. I was able to be right at her side (in the form of a Laptop with a webcam - the pic is to the right). I spent 6 hours at her side via Skype Video and a few more hours via chat/phone. It was amazing, despite being half way around the world I was able to interact with everyone in the room and see everything happening.
I bought a flag in honor of Benjamin and on November 29th it was flown over Camp Beuhring, Kuwait in his honor. The day before Benjamin's birth I had the opportunity to have lunch with Governor Huntsman (Governor of Utah). I explained to him that my son would be born any day and that I had purchased a flag for him. The governor was very gracious and posed for a picture with me and the flag (the pic is to the left).
I've attached two pictures. One of myself with Governor Huntsman and the flag flown in honor of Benjamin and the other of Benjamin on my laptop screen about 1 hour after he was born.
Before we take a few days off, I wanted to stop by with something I think sums up the holiday (and general Community) spirit. A group of eBay employees recently had the opportunity to deliver holiday cheer in New Orleans as part of eBay’s Holiday Dreams contest. To support Holiday Dreams, eBay employees were encouraged to use eBay Giving Works to buy and sell over the last couple months. We also had an internal employee contest, and the winners were able to travel to New Orleans and assist in delivering the proceeds to a local charity. They also brought back some amazing stories. Since three of them work here in Salt Lake City, I asked them to share a few words about their experiences on camera. Enjoy, and happy holidays!
Greetings from Vancouver! As the holiday season fast approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I’m going to buy for my family and friends. I normally get a good number of my holiday gifts on eBay mainly because I love the convenience of purchasing the items from the comfort of my home, and having the item delivered right to my doorstop. Also, here in Vancouver we’re currently in the midst of weeks of torrential downpour (further feeding the “It’s always raining in Vancouver” stereotype). It has been SO wet that by the mid-way mark of November, we’d already set a new record for precipitation in Vancouver during the eleventh month! This makes shopping from the comfort of my dry home while sipping my warm and calming soy chai latte that much more appealing.
Last week I purchased a Rangefinder (for those of you who don’t know – like I didn’t – this is a handy dandy tool that golfers use to gauge distances to the exact yard) for my husband from a wonderful member – thegolfstore286725. That’s all the holiday shopping I’ve done so far though, I have been racking my brains for ideas of what IT is that my mom, sister, cousins, nephews and in-laws all want.
All this thinking about IT brought me back to a neat contest that a group of employees from our Trust and Safety department held a while back. It was called the “Make IT Yourself Contest”. This was just another one of the fun and quirky things we do to keep work fun and allow our employees to be creative (and win great prizes such as eBay Gift Certificates so they can really but whatever IT is they want). Employees each made their own IT, and some of them got so creative and innovative that I thought their creations were worth sharing with you. Check them out - the ITs are made out of candy, metal, cross-stich, and ice, and there's even a baby IT! The slideshow in a cool format provided by eBay Web Services API developer Slide.
Well, until next time, Au Revoir (that’s French for good-bye… I’m practicing my French since we recently launched a French-language eBay.ca site which will be supported out of Vancouver)! Hopefully next time I can tell you about the consecutive weeks of sunshine we’re experiencing.....haha, wishful thinking.
Julie Drossos from our Vancouver office is back, and she's got video!
Take it away....
Hi Again!
Well, it’s been nearly a month since I made my first appearance on the Chatter blog, so I figured it was time to drop by and say hi from Vancouver again!
Below you can watch a little movie that was made for the exclusive viewing pleasure of our loyal Chatter visitors. We were a little limited with time and didn’t have access to any fancy movie equipment, so this film is not going to win an academy award by any means, but it should give you a fun and entertaining “inside peek” into our customer support office here in Vancouver. I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll be back again in a few weeks!
You've already met Mike Mason, one of our stellar employees based in Salt Lake City (well, Draper, but SLC is close enough). That's where many of our Customer Support reps are located, and as some of you already know, there are a bunch out there who are big sellers on the site. Mike is graciously stopping by again to introduce to you some of them....
Selling in SLCHi again everyone. The history of eBay Customer Support is interesting in the fact that it really all began with eBay members simply helping out other eBay members—a rather natural occurrence fitting of the eBay Community. As eBay continued to grow it became clear that a more formal Customer Support function was needed and given that customer support originated from the eBay Community, it was only natural that many of the first official Customer Support reps were also avid eBay members. In fact, in the Customer Support ranks today there are dozens of eBay sellers and PowerSellers working in all types of support areas.
This, of course, has been a great advantage over the years for continuing to develop the customer support experience and is a testament to the closeness that eBay employees have to the eBay Community. I thought I’d take a moment and spotlight a few of the SLC Customer Support employees who are active sellers or PowerSellers. Who knows, perhaps one of them has even assisted you over the years.
Chris Porter (all.business), part of our Workforce Management team, and Jason Hughes (jasonncynde), who works on a team called eWatch (one of our teams that keeps an eye on the site to look for problems), have been selling on eBay for over 7 years. Chris focuses on selling sports memorabilia and cards. Jason primarily sells video games and video game systems. Chris is also a big St. Louis Cardinals fan…("Go Cards," he says).
Emily and Elizabeth Ferguson (kissmeifimwrong) are members of the Seller Support team (and sisters!). They have bought and sold on the site for over 5 years, primarily focusing on selling used books. That's them to the right.
Jeremy Losee (treeslothsales), and a cardboard Arwen the Elf Princess from the Lord of Rings movies, is a member of the Seller Support team and a PowerSeller who has been active on the site for over 5 years. See if you can tell which one in the picture to the left is Jeremy. He focuses his selling on DVDs and collectibles (and yep, you guessed it, that includes Lord of the Rings collectibles).
I'll be looking to profile more folks in customer support in the future.
A couple of weeks ago Mike Mason from our Customer Support office in Salt Lake stopped by with the first of what will hopefully be a long series of posts. I also mentioned that I was working on getting someone from their sister office in Vancouver to write as well, and I'm happy to say that my mission was a success! Meet Julie Drossos, one of our fantastic folks north of the border. She and Mike will be checking in periodically with news and updates about their parts of the eBay world.
Hello everyone, my name is Julie (that’s me on the left) and I am writing from Customer Support in beautiful Vancouver! That’s Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada – not Vancouver, Washington. I work closely with Mike in Salt Lake City, who you met here on the blog a couple weeks ago. Mike and I both love working at eBay Customer Support and we’re excited to get this opportunity to connect with you, and to share a little about what goes on at our offices. In fact, there’s a chance that we may have met some of you last June at eBay Live! in Las Vegas. Perhaps you came to the Chatterbox to tell us your story or share your favourite purchase? Here is a photo of Mike and I in front of the Chatterbox…. Recognize us?!
Anyway, back to what we do here at Customer Support in Vancouver (by the way, that’s our home on the left!). Since we opened our doors in March of 2003, our office has grown from a humble group of brave souls who moved to Vancouver from the Salt Lake City office to get us up and running to a 24/7 office of over 1000 employees. Most of our employees are support reps, and they spend their days trying to ensure that you have the best and most efficient buying and/or selling experience possible on the site. Like our counterparts in Salt Lake City, we too handle a variety of Trust & Safety issues, as we are always striving to provide you with a safe and honest trading platform. A number of our people also work in the Live Chat department. These are the friendly people who are waiting to serve you via real time chat at the other end of the computer. Many of you have no doubt heard about eBay Express – if you’ve looked for help while on eBay Express, you’ve likely talked with one of our eBay Express Customer Service Specialists. (And if you haven’t yet experienced eBay Express, well what are you waiting for?!) In addition, we have a fantastic billing team here, and a number of our employees also support eBay buyers and sellers in countries around the world, including the UK, India, Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and more.
I’d like to introduce you to a few of the great people that lead the Vancouver Customer support centre:
Zach Pino is a Director here in Customer Support, and Ian Clarke is a Sr. Director. As you can see, they are a lot of fun. Being the nice guys they are, they are pictured here happily BBQ-ing burgers for all 1000+ of our employees on Canada Day last July.
As I mentioned, we are a 24/7 support centre. Having employees working long hours around the clock means that we have to ensure we have some fun at work too (especially since we don't have sheep to watch like at Mike's office)!
For instance, last month we had our very own “eBayzing Race” (based on the popular TV show, The Amazing Race), here are the first half of the 120 participants from our office, ready to take-off at the start line!
Well, until next time, I hope you have enjoyed learning a little about the Vancouver Customer Support center and what we do here. Next time I hope to be able to show you a video tour of the Vancouver office, as we have lots of folks here that want to say hi to you all! Hope your October is off to a great start and I’ll be back soon!
Live help
The week of March 3rd marked the 5th Anniversary of the eBay Vancouver Customer Support center. Since its humble beginnings with a handful of employees in March of 2003, the center has grown exponentially and now proudly provides 24/7 support to eBay members around the world!
Julie Drossos from our Vancouver office is back, and she's got video!
