Hacking Incident Hurts eBay Auctions

In a surprising move, eBay is allowing sellers to cancel auction transactions for an 11-day period–as long as they used PayPal to finance the original transaction. The move follows a recent hacking of the e-retailers customer database. However, if buyers didn’t use PayPal to pay for the items, sellers are out of luck.

The unauthorized access to user databases was detected by eBay in February and March; buyers and sellers were asked to reset their passwords as of May 21st, which as eBay noted on its blog–may disrupt commerce for some customers.

“We will also be communicating with the winning bidder for any cancelled auction-style transaction during this time period to ensure they continue to have great buyer experiences on eBay,” eBay wrote.

eBay is also allowing sellers to cancel live listings and is proactively refunding listing and commission fees for auction listings that ended on May 21. The company further announced that all listing and final value fees will be refunded automatically for auction-style listings that ended between 6:00 AM PDT on Wednesday, May 21, 2014, and 11:59 PM PDT on Wednesday, May 21, 2014. Sellers’ June invoices will reflect that credit and will see these credits on their June invoice. Sellers can end any auction-style listing without penalty until May 31, 2014 and will receive a credit for all selling fees related to these listings on their June invoice. Sellers can also cancel any auction-style listings that ended in a sale between 6:00 AM PDT on Wednesday, May 21, 2014, and 11:59 PM PDT on Saturday, May 31, as long as the buyer paid with PayPal and the purchase can be verified.

eBay also updated users on the process of changing their passwords, explaining that if they hadn’t yet changed their password, they would at some point be prompted to do so when they login or before they complete a transaction.

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