Max Godin
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Ever had a major issue with your eBay account and needed to speak to a human eBay representative asap? In this post I’m going to share all the best ways to reach the eBay customer service team (and share a surprising conclusion in the end!).
One of the most stressful times as an eBay seller is when something crucial goes wrong (such as account suspension, having listings removed, account hacking issues) and you must leave everything you’re doing at that moment and attend to the problem.
Whenever this happened to me (I wrote some time ago about how I reinstated my suspended eBay account) I was looking for the fastest way to reach a human representative at eBay but this has always been a huge challenge on its own because eBay is doing whatever it can to hide their ‘human’ contact details.
Why eBay hides their customer service phone number?
The short answer is quite simple: money.
eBay has 25 million sellers and a total of 170 million users (buyers and sellers).
Imagine if just 0.1% of those customers would need help from an actual customer service representative at the same time, that’s 170,000 simultaneous calls.
Even if a representative could take 3 calls an hour and assuming you would be willing to wait up to 40 minutes in order to get service, eBay would still need more than 60,000 support reps.
Building a call center with such an enormous amount of employees is a huge financial expense, and I’m not even talking about the time it takes to build such an operation, the amount of training required and the complexity of automated systems needed to manage this are also quite unfathomable.
That’s why eBay help center is geared towards offering you ready made answers for numerous topics and if you can’t find the answer it first sends you to the eBay community to seek help from fellow eBay sellers.
The absolute last resort from eBay’s point of view is providing you with a phone number to call their customer service team.
Let’s go over all the ways you can contact eBay’s customer service quickly. Many people are not comfortable calling customer service because of different reasons (for example a language barrier) so I’m going to cover chat and messaging options as well.
How to reach eBay customer service on social media?
Not surprisingly, at least to me, the easiest way to reach eBay customer support seems to be through social media. In an age when people don’t like talking on the phone and in a globalized world where speaking by phone internationally can be costly or language barriers prevent people from physically talking it is no wonder that ‘chat’ in its many forms is flourishing. As far as eBay is concerned,Twitter and Facebook are leading the curve:
eBay’s Twitter Support
eBay customer support has opened up a an account specifically dedicated to customer service on Twitter: @AskeBay. In order to ask them a question you need to ‘follow’ them and then tweet your question and insert ‘@AskeBay’ at any point – the eBay team now has the option to message you directly and you should be hearing from them shortly.
eBay users living outside the USA should add their country for example @eBayUK or @eBayIndia.
Here are some examples of interactions people have had with eBay’s customer support on Twitter:
eBay’s Facebook Support
Reaching eBay on Facebook is also pretty straightforward and you should receive a response within a few hours. Go directly to eBay’s Facebook page and write them a message.
If you are outside the US, you can easily find your country’s eBay Facebook page. British eBay users for example can go to the eBay UK Facebook account.
Here are some examples of interactions people have had with eBay’s customer support on Facebook:
How to quickly find a solution with eBay’s help desk?
If social media support isn’t an option for you either because you don’t know how to use it or don’t have Facebook or Twitter then you have another option. You can follow these steps which lead you to a phone number using the ‘Help & Contact’ section. I will provide you with other phone numbers and discuss eBay’s level of service via telephone a bit later on in this post. For now:
Step 1: click ‘Help & Contact’
Step 2: Click the blue ‘Contact Us’ button at the bottom of the page
Step 3: Choose the relevant category
Step 4: Getting to the ‘call us’ button
click the three options that best describe the issue you are having or randomly click three in order to get the ‘call us’ button to appear on your screen
Step 5: click on ‘call us’
The blue ‘Call Us’ button will only appear from 5 am – 10 pm Pacific time – click the button and the phone number will appear with a one-time passcode
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Note that in most cases the phone option won’t appear as eBay is trying to hide this information from its users as much as possible.
How to use eBay community to get help?
Another way to get answers you need about eBay related issues is through the eBay community. You can search for your question or topic and many questions have already been answered so you can flip through the search results and try to find a quick fix for the issue you are having. If the answer doesn’t exist you can start a brand new ‘thread’ and an eBay community volunteer will respond. I will give you examples of both scenarios.
In the first case I googled the eBay community and typed in the search bar ‘How can I send a return label to a buyer?’, a similar question to mine appeared:
After reading the query and determining its relevance to me I scrolled down to see the different answers provided:
If you got the answer you were searching for then great but if not then you can always start a new discussion. Here’s how:
Step 1: choose the relevant category
Step 2:Click the ‘start a new discussion’ button
Click the ‘start a new discussion’ button on the right hand of the page:
Step 3: Ask your question
give your question a subject and elaborate your issue in the ‘body’ section, then click ‘post’. That’s it you should be receiving answers to your questions in no time at all.
How to contact eBay customer service through email?
Unfortunately eBay does not communicate well via e-mail. I have searched the web for their contact info and only came across their Australian address: [emailprotected]. But from eBay forums and community responses this is one of the least recommended ways to contact eBay. It seems that eBay doesn’t have or doesn’t want to have the proper resources and manpower it would take to back an email customer support team. Here are some of the comments I found on The official eBay Community forum:
Another way to email eBay is via their help center if you can’t find the answer in some cases they will offer you the possibility to email them and they typically reply within 24 hours.
How to reach eBay customer service by phone?
The last resort in my opinion is to try and reach eBay telephone support. The skinny of it is that they are very unprofessional and unknowledgeable but I will discuss this a bit more at length after I explain how you can contact eBay by phone.
According to GetHuman, a company which provides info and help getting human representatives on the line, the average wait time is 14 minutes when calling eBay customer service. The best number to call based on statistics they gathered from 300, 000 eBay users is: 866-540-3229 for customer care related issues. Common customer service issues that this hotline provides service for includes:
- Fraud
- Refunds
- Returns
- Complaints
- order issues
- tracking orders
The customer support team is based in Utah, California and the Philippines and as I mentioned above is open Mon-Fri from 5am-10 pm and Sat-Sun from 6 am to 6 pm PST. Another number which I have seen circulated on the internet is for eBay’s Fraud Detection department, you can try reaching them at: 866-643-1607.
Is it helpful at all to contact eBay customer service?
I don’t know how many of you have been through this but I spoke with eBay’s customer service probably 40-50 times over the years and in 99% of cases I had much more knowledge than them about every eBay policy, rule or aspect of selling on eBay. You have to remember that we as sellers live and breath eBay every day while in many cases these customer service reps are doing this job for up to a year and most of them never sold a single item on eBay.
eBay also has a large customer service center in the Philippines where they receive very basic training and mostly provide answers they read from a manual similar to eay’s help desk.
That is one more motivation for eBay to hide its customer service numbers as the level of support you receive is often embarrassing.
I found that the various popular sellers groups on Facebook provide answers in seconds and those answers are given by professional eBay sellers who experienced the exact same problem you have and possess valuable insights.
One group I recently discovered is eBay Dropshipping Mastermind with over 23,000 members, check out for yourself how fast sellers get responses:
There are other groups as well, my rule of thumb is to join groups with over 5,000 members which have high volume daily activity.
Over to you
So there you have it, all the ways to reach eBay customer service plus why you shouldn’t 🙂
If you know of any other relevant phone numbers, emails or modes of contact that can be useful please share them in the comments below and I’ll add them to the post.
Max Godin
Co-founder and CMO of CrazyLister -the world's leading eBay & Amazon listing software.2x eBay award recipient for excellence in sales and highest conversion rates.Started my journey in eCommerce back in 2008, grew an online business from zero to $4.5M in sales and never looked back.
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