Ina has been around ebay as long as me, since the late 90’s. I have followed her for many years and she is 100% correct. Never caught her in the media lies and drama, very straight shooter. My respect for Ina’s honesty and accurate reporting is extremely high.
I know, that is so crazy. Must be way more to the story than what is being released.
The settlement is going back to court and much more will come out.
Don’t believe any of the attack on Ina had a negative impact on eBay sales. eBay buyers have no clue in the world what that was all about. eBay’s problems are self induced, it sure was not from ecommercebytes calling them out.
I was just looking for the links on ecommercebytes regarding the current status and did not have much luck finding them. Just read some recent stuff a couple of days ago regarding the case.
Sadly, I cannot say that I had the best experience. When Amazon published the apology for me and pinned it to the top of the Amazon Seller Forum, I submitted a form through her website (and also e-mailed her) reporting this and hoping that she will publish an article.
I received no response. Apparently Amazon publicly apologizing to a seller for wrongdoing and acknowledging a financial settlement is not worthy of an article on her blog
As an active litigant, I can tell you that if there are no public statements about the litigation, they either confidentially settled or the litigation is still active.
Thanks for the invite Kika. As you can see, I’ve joined (I used to be Rugsy a few years back).
The UK/EU forums are soon going the way of the US forum with store names being made public. I have no wish for my store to be destroyed by some keyboard warrior whom I may have upset and with nothing better to do so whatever few posts I used to make will stop as soon as the new forum comes in.
Shame on them and kudos to you. Best of luck in everything you do.
great to see you there! I only recently noticed that you started posting on the Amazon UK Seller Forum again. I missed everyone so much, feel free to invite them over.
I am hoping that this forum will become the world’s #1 Amazon Seller Forum. Right now, I am still it the process of migrating content from the old forum which used to be a part of my blog, however once I am confident about everything being fully finished, then I will advertise it on FB, YouTube etc. I am looking forward to see there the whole Amazon community.
We already have several hundreds of users as of today. Many of the USA forum’s most active regular contributors are on this forum, including @FunkyMonkey or @skeeter.
It will take a while to achieve the levels of traffic and engagement similar to the Amazon Forums but I believe we have good chances
I never seen that…
They are good at only showing users what they want them to see, you would be the only one they wanted to see that.
Ina might not have gotten your email, that is possible. If amazon would have not allowed that message to display when she logged in, I am pretty confident she would not have been able to verify it.
They must have only showed that on the UK forum, I sure don’t recall seeing that on USA site. I see on one screen shot it was USA…
I can play the “old age card” on that, if I did not see it, ??
@AmazonUKForumRefugee, if you don’t mind, since no one on the Amazon Forum apparently understands why is Amazon discontinuing anonymous posting on the New Forum, it would be helpful if you could clarify it for everyone in the discussion.
The actual reason why users on the New Forum will have their storefront names displayed is to ensure that if someone gets targeted in any way, they are able to take a legal action against the businesses responsible for the comments.
When all users are anonymous, any victim of bullying/harassment is unable to sue the individuals and has to go after Amazon instead, compelling them into actions through courts.
Obtaining the identity of anonymous users using legal means takes years and they can deny operating the accounts anyway. Meanwhile, Amazon will be getting dragged into a dispute they are not interested to be a part of.
Having identities of forum users published waives Amazon’s legal responsibility and obligations for any abusive content published.
I’m not sure if I’m the best person to explain the actual reasons but I’ll certainly give some of my own opinions. Amazon say that business names will be now part of a selling partner’s profile and cannot be removed to increase transparency within the community.
Going back a few years, it was easy (if you knew how to and many didn’t) to find out the store name of any poster. It was just a matter of looking at the source code of the page. This stopped when the forum was updated and, to the best of my knowledge, this was stopped. There may have been other ways of finding out but I was not privy to them, Kika probably knows what to do
Some regular posters were regularly targeted by trolls and other nasty people, hiding behind the anonymity of the forum. In Kika’s case, this became quite serious but I don’t know any details as I was not visiting the forum at the time. It would appear that Kika sought the help of Amazon but no help came.
Having store names in user profiles removes some anonymity from the forum and this means that posters should think before they post.
I do understand why Amazon have decided to do this, they just want to wash their hands of any responsibility in true Amazon style. But I do have some reservations, namely:
store names do not identify the person unless they are a one-person band. Companies should but don’t necessarily have different sign-ons for each user. And in any case, although I could be wrong, there can only be 1 forum user per store name. So legal action will need to taken against the business, not the person
people like to post their own personal views on the forum. Posting in the new way would imply that it is the view of the business which may not be the case
having store names visible means that it a post upsets someone, they could easily target your business and worst case, destroy it. For this reason, I will not be posting on the new forum when it comes in, it is just not worth it (thank you Kika for this alternative)
I still believe that Amazon will still bear some responsibility but that’s just my opinion. It depends on how they deal with any complaints from users
Rugsy, I suspect that they purposely announced the launch of the new Forum at the same time when also introducing the payments reserve (which negatively impacts mainly the most seasoned and established sellers) to divert the attention
Now, everyone is discussing the payments reserve and talk about the New Forum is quiet.
I may invite Hobson here as well. Hoping that we will see more people coming.
I have been thinking about this point carefully. I understand that any public statement by a business could be turned against them in today’s world. But Amazon also didn’t want to let people have multiple forum accounts for each employee (so they can give likes on each other’s posts etc).
The Amazon Forum was intended to facilitate professional discussions in business English similar to LinkedIn (where everyone is also posting under their real identity), but it sadly turned into a lion’s den, so a compromise had to be made.
I believe that the bullies have been simultaneously privately messaging the moderators in rebuttal, alleging that I did something to them outside of Amazon’s platform.
So the moderators (and Amazon) didn’t want to get dragged into a dispute and it was easier for them to ban one person (young woman from Eastern Europe who is unlikely to have means to litigate) than a group of significantly older and western individuals.
This is the main reason why Amazon is discontinuing the private messages. To prevent individuals from privately messaging the moderators and gossiping about other users.
I don’t think I have ever seen anyone bullying on LinkedIn. For some reason, there is nothing but polite professional posts and congratulations from what I can see.
