A screen shot of the Auctiva home page

A screen shot of the Auctiva home page (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Auctiva, one strike, you’re out?

As fallout continues from the Auctiva crisis, many sellers are throwing in the towel, deleting their Auctiva accounts and changing their eBay passwords.

Is this the right course of action or an over-dramatic knee jerk reaction? While they have badly mishandled this, this is the first time there has been an issue like this for the site.

How do you feel about it?

I agree that Auctiva has badly mishandled this issue in three key ways, namely:

  • Not being timely with notices about this issue. Bloggers picked up the slack and message boards were a buzz for almost 24 hours before Auctiva jumped into action. That left a lot of time for people to think the worst and lost some people a lot of sales.
  • Not being transparent enough. Auctiva still hasn’t said directly what the issue was. The truth would go a long way towards resorting some consumer confidence right now. Right now, we still don’t know if they are really the bad guy or just a victim of mis-reporting.
  • Giving bad safety advice. When the truth came out, Auctiva recommended bypassing the safety features of your browser and using the site anyway. Esspecially in light of my second reason above, asking users to bypass safety settings without giving a reason or explanation of what the issue was in the first place seems not only unreasonable but also a little suspicious to me. Why acting so guilty?

ColderICE has some great articles examining the fallout from this issue over at his site but what I wanted to know now is, from those of you that are Auctiva users, how does this crisis affect your future use of their services?

Are you willing to give them another try or is this too much of a violation of trust?