The interesting thing is I still got refunded, about a week after my account was banned. Their backend must be a total mess, but it worked out in my favor somehow. If not for that I definitely would have done a chargeback.

> Their backend must be a total mess

The URL structures on the website are scary and indeed suggest the backend is a horrible dumpster fire.

The history of EBay is long (in internet commerce terms) and complicated. At one point 100s of millions of customers on a single oracle db. A colleague of mine was working on this around 1998/9

https://web.archive.org/web/20070104021557/http://www.addsim...

Can confirm, been working with many eBay APIs for a while now and it's completely and totally a massive dumpster fire. Most API versions are in the thousands, and there's so many random gotchas and contradicting docs and daily bugs and breakages you don't want to go anywhere near it. Not to mention their only recourse for contacting them about bugs or developer issues is via prepaid premium support, paid only via paypal, in which the link for it frequently goes down too. If you check their dev forums it's filled with nothing but people complaining about all sorts of random issues and never getting real responses.

Not only a mess but they seem to have been halfway through modernising things for years.

They built a new API but are probably never going to be able to get rid if the old one.

Kinda makes me wonder if the person handling the case on their end got confused and banned the wrong party.

The terrible quality of their APIs does suggest it's a mess behind as well yeah.

This is what I did in a very similar predicament. They sent me to collections after the chargeback and dinged my credit.

This only works if your bank is on your side. I asked for a chargeback with my bank at the time (Square) for a fraudulent transaction and they terminated my account.

Thankfully, banks in general are in a stricter regulatory environment with a government-level watchdog you can escalate to, though that might not apply for electronic money institutions (or whatever the US equivalent is).

No, why do people think this? In the US banks have a right to refuse to do business with you for (almost) any reason and refuse they do. They are more likely to ban you than eBay. There's no right to have a bank account, there's no right to keep your back account - full stop.

This happened to me recently when American Express sided against me when Expedia essentially stole money from me for services it didn't deliver.

Now there's two companies I'll never do more business with.

Oh so far I've always found American Express to be much more reliable than all other banks when it comes to Chargebacks

Me to up until this incident. It's worth noting that AmEx has acquired some businesses from Expedia Group and Expedia Group itself is now a major shareholder in AmEx Global Business Travel.