Trouble brewing at LatAm Ebay wannabe

As the global financial crisis eroded the value of eBay's holdings in LatAm auctions site MercadoLibre, causing it to take a $423M hit, technical problems mean another kind of trouble is brewing for auction giant.

Users cannot get into their personal section see purchases or sales

Last week, tech trouble began at the MercadoLibre Latin American auctions web site - owned in part by eBay - with some users reporting intermittent outages. Now, for the second day in a row, this scribbler has been unable to get to his "My MercadoLibre" section. The snafu was noticed first early yesterday, and continued during the day until it finally seemed to fix itself, temporarily by later afternoon.

Today, the problems returned with any clicks on URLs starting with /jm/ leading the surfer back to the home page, first landing you into MercadoLibre's country-selection screen. It is pretty annoying and needless to say without access to your personal section you cannot see what auctions are pending feedback or payment. Imagine Ebay operating without allowing its users to get into their peronal section.

Attempts to get into your personal section is redirected to the main entry page.

Back in August MercadoLibre announced it was purchasing the remaining independent operations of its until-then-arch rival DeRemate, as part of a $40 million transaction. The competing site and its users are being assimilated into the great ML mothership. However, some users aren't too happy about the migration and integration of their DeRemate accounts into MercadoLibre.

Both in Chile and in Argentina some users are voicing their concerns: At Chilean site MadBoxPC user Gabriel says "they erased over 100 stars (positive feedbacks) from my account", while Juan replies "I have lost 500 stars! now I have to begin from scratch once again. Let's hope some alternative sites appear". He ends with some irony: "now MercadoLibre has partnered to do advertising with AliBaba.com - and the forty thieves, how appropriate!".

After clicking on the appropiate country flag, users are back where they started

In Argentina, another user took things a step further and filed a public compliant at a consumer affairs site DeReclamos.com saying "for the last few days I cannot see my published articles. Yesterday I was able to see my account briefly, but then I was unable to log-in again. I get a yellow screen with all the flags of the countries where ML operates. I cannot see how my sales are doing and it's worrying because I have several items for sale starting at $1 and I cannot see how those are going. I want to know what they are going to do about it as I feel swindled because they are not providing the kind of service they used to".

A recent paper from Enterprise Management Associates finds the average downtime cost, from small to large enterprises to be about $45,000. In the case of businesses relying on customers doing transactions, the cost is likely much higher. So it's not only its brand name reputation which is at stake for MercadoLibre, it's also its income. With fierce competitors like the Clarin group's MasOportunidades.com - which doesn't charge sellers to list items for sale - they can't afford to ignore customer compliants. An exec at the firm has been contacted but we haven't heard from him so far.

In other words... trouble is brewing for Ebay's little experiment south of the border and the MercadoLibre brand unless they fix their technical snafu, pronto.µ