Recently, a lot of eBay users received a great coupon in their e-mail: $10 off if you complete a sale on the site. It expires on April 6, this coming Sunday. What a great idea: it will encourage customers to make eBay purchases! Well, it would have been if it worked, at least. Instead, customers were told that the coupon had “no remaining funding.” Oh.

Reader Nick tried out this fab coupon, and the experience hasn’t left him all that keen to keep buying things on eBay. “Especially frustrating is that items for sale on eBay are time sensitive,” he wrote to Consumerist. “I committed to buy something expecting a simple coupon to work, instead I’m out an extra $10 i didn’t wish to spend.” The specific item he wants might be available today, but unless it’s in the inventory of one of the big-name retailers now selling on eBay, he has no way to know for sure that the item will be available whenever eBay gets around to fixing the coupon.

Oh, yes: fixing the coupon. eBay customer service told Nick that they’re working on fixing the problem–another customer who wrote to eCommerceBytes was told that the promotion was more popular than expected and ran out of funds, and the team needs to get more funds into the relevant account. Okay. Here’s the thing, though: they can’t go back and give customers a retroactive ten bucks off. Nope. Nick was told to keep shopping, and maybe the coupon would work eventually.

“They instead just told me to keep on trying with no ETA to speak of,” he writes. “I guess they’d like me to keep on buying items without knowing if a simple coupon will work or not.” Maybe what they meant is that he should try to purchase items with a fixed “Buy It Now” price instead of bidding in auctions, but it’s ridiculous to tell customers to just keep trying to make purchases for the next week or so until the coupon works.

We sent a request for comment over to eBay, and will update this post when (if) they get back to us. An eBay representative reached out to us, sharing the good news that if you want to use this coupon, you don’t have to wander the site trying to buy things in order to find out whether the coupon has been funded again. “We will be sending an email within the next 24 hours to these customers to offer them a replacement coupon to be applied toward their next purchase,” an eBay representative wrote to us on Tuesday evening.

eBay Fails to Honor Coupons It Gave Buyers [EcommerceBytes]
Has anyone had problems redeeming their $10 coupon code recently? [eBay Forums]

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