Wednesday, June 23, 2010
More frustration over vague deletion notices
Do you like this story?
One of the biggest turnoffs for Kijiji noobs is having a series of ads deleted for mysterious reasons. Yes, the rules are clear and simple, but the email you get when your ads are wiped is rather vague. Beyond that, it's almost impossible to get a clear answer from Kijiji "customer service" about why you were turfed.
Kitchener-Waterloo real estate lady Pam McInnes posts a blog article at activerain outlining her bad experience, and asserting that the problems she's had are hurting Kijiji in the marketplace:
I've been using Kijiji for three years now, from advertising my writing services to books for sale to my real estate services and listed homes. I've even used it to purchase a thing or two, and what started out to be a great place to buy and sell locally has rapidly turned into a place that has given me more grief than results.
Their rules and processes are vague to say the least, and during the past six months when my ads all of a sudden were getting deleted, I couldn't get answers from anyone. Without direct answers to my specific questions from someone who has actually been hired as an employee of the company (all those in the discussion forums are volunteers) there's no way to stop repeating the mistakes - if in fact there were any, which I have my doubts.
Ads, for the most part, get deleted when another user either flags them or posts them in the discussion forum - at which point it depends on the mood and availability of the moderator as to whether the ad gets deleted or not. I've seen ads reported on a thread in the forum and they've sat there for days because the moderator just wasn't around to deal with them.
When ads get deleted, advertisers are notified with a generic e-mail message stating a list of possible reasons at to why the ad MIGHT have been deleted, and then unless you have saved the ad on your computer, which is a ridiculous thing to have to do, the ad is gone because the fools have already deleted it before notifying you that there is something wrong with it.
Then you go on the forum to find out what's wrong. NOW HERE'S THE REAL KICKER. If you don't have a copy of the ad they say: "We don't know what your ad said, so we can't tell you exactly what the problem was." If you have a copy of the ad and post it for answers they delete the thread. No advertising allowed in the discussion forums, you know!
And then of course if you don't like what they are saying and tell them so, they retaliate like toddlers and delete all your other ads - just to show you who's boss.
Oh, I've submitted tickets to Kijiji (who knows where those e-mails get sent) before, but have NEVER gotten any replies to my e-mails from anyone who is in charge there (hell, I'd settle for a paid employee just working the front lines). With no contact names, no phone numbers how can you get results from a company that hides from their customers?
And I won't even get into how they don't understand how advertising works. Well, okay. Maybe a little...
Some of their rules are a direct conflict as to what needs to be done to make an ad successful. At one point, about two years ago, they deleted all my book ads. I went into the discussion and asked why. One of the moderators told me that my ads were too similar. Too similar? They were all ads for completely different books? At which point I was told to put all my books in one ad to avoid my ads from being deleted in the future.
Really? Oh yeah, sure. That'll be effective!
After submitting a ticket I didn't get a reply from Kijiji, but four days later half my books were put back. HALF! And still no reason as to why they were deleted in the first place and why only half of them were put back. I know I didn't post more than their quota for that day, which is 25 unique ads every day.
Also, there are many people in my area who have had ads deleted and have never found out why. They all have told me they will never spend money on that site for fear their ads will be deleted out of the blue and they'll be throwing their money away. So Kijiji's bad business practices are already starting to effect them. Oh, it might not be tomorrow or even five years from now, but if they don't change the way they do business they could very well be history.
Now, I've been an entrepreneur for over ten years and a consumer for much longer...much, much longer...I know that customer service is the key to success for any business. Even large corporations who seem like they will never go out of business for treating their customer badly, ultimately will.
So, so long Kijiji. I won't be using you any more, but I wish you the best of luck, for if you don't get your act together, you're going to need it.
So, have you had the same experience? How would you improve the system?
This post was written by: Gord McCord
Gord McCord, webmaster at You Suck at Kijiji, makes fun of funny things on Kijiji. Do not take him too seriously. Also do not take yourself too seriously. Follow him on Twitter
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
30 Responses to “More frustration over vague deletion notices”
June 23, 2010 at 9:27 AM
Hi. It's me. Pam McInnes, the real estate lady who wrote the original blog on ActiveRain.
How would I improve the system? They are doing sooooo many things wrong, but I'll just hit of the basics...simple places they can start.
1) Stop hiding from your customers. Post names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses to actual customer service agents who can help get issues resolved.
2) Get someone on staff who actually understands advertising/marketing and who doesn't want to redefine the English language (duplicate means exact copy of an original, not more than one ad in a single category), and an ad is not effective if you write it with more than one message for your target market.
2) Get rid of the volunteer moderators. Most of them are immature and don't have a clue how to disarm a disgruntled customer. More often than not they add fuel to the fire.
3) Take responsibility for your own site and stop allowing other customers to flag ads. Surely you know that competitors will flag their competitions ads to get them removed, even temporarily.
4) Stop hiding behind "this is a free site" excuse so that you don't have be accountable for what's going on and pay for proper staff to run the site. We all know you make money from charging for links, top ads, and getting the ads on the home page - not to mention your sponsored advertisers.
5) Re-invent your entire deletion process, i.e., don't delete ads until the customer has been contract first and e-mail the customer with a specific explanation as to what's wrong with the ad so they have a chance to correct it.
I could go on, but this would be a great start.
June 23, 2010 at 11:00 AM
I've been visiting the kijiji boards for a short while now and I'm always surprised at how often the "regulars" JUMP all over people who post a "Why was my ad pulled - kijiji won't give me a straight answer" posts.
People who don't spend their entire lives reading the boards don't have an inside view of how kijiji works - they just know their ad got pulled and it's impossible to get a straight answer from anyone in charge. Many of the regs don't seem to realize how frustrating it is to get a non-answer from kijiji and rude comments from board people, just for asking a simple question. There are a few posters who are unfailingly polite and helpful, but many seem to think that kijiji can do no wrong, so the ad-poster is completely at fault for ads being pulled. At what point in time did it become acceptable for a company to provide such horrible customer support as kijiji and ebay provide? If their style of service ever becomes the norm, we are SCREWED!
June 24, 2010 at 5:54 PM
Just wanted to clear something up, here is how you contact paid Kijiji employees. This is the best way to get a clear answer as to why your ads got deleted.
http://info.kijiji.ca/help/index.php?a=add
July 1, 2010 at 10:50 PM
You people hit the nail right on the head!!! One of their site rules, actually discriminates against posters by only allowing them to post in the city closest to them!!! The mods in the forum are nothing but childish clowns, and are incapable of holding a proper discussion. Ask them a question, and they will ban you. There little knowitall minions only add fuel to the fire. I have had a nightmare of a time trying to use kijiji, and have actually gotten one of their moderators warned twice for his actions, I am now having trouble with them again for listing my motorcycle in London, and Toronto, after having it listed in KW for a week with only lowball results. The results from London, and TO were favorable, although short lived. I am now banned from kijiji because of this??? I do have one of the moderators names, and personal email address! I would LOVE to give it to a hacker to infect his computer! LOL!!!
July 1, 2010 at 11:00 PM
Mark:
Making people advertise in their local city isn't discrimination -- it's the whole point of the site. Notice "FREE LOCAL CLASSIFIEDS" all over the place. Local. As in where you live. It's not discrimination, it's the site's raison d'etre.
July 6, 2010 at 9:13 AM
However, because those who have made that rule are not from Canada, they have no idea how close together most cities are to each other, and that has been pointed out endlessly in the forums.
If they want to do business in Canada, perhaps they should have taken the time to learn about our geography first.
And to the person who submitted the url to the "Help Desk" (which is a form to submit a ticket that never gets answered)....You think that's a viable way for them to help their customers? REALLY?
July 6, 2010 at 4:38 PM
most-recent-anon: (why won't you people sign your posts?)
Kijiji Canada has staff and management in Canada.
(Most notably Craig Miller: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/craigmillertoronto)
I'm not sure where you're getting information to indicate that the site is organized and maintained from another country?
July 7, 2010 at 4:30 PM
Speculation, how else?
They certainly don't post that information or Mr. Craig Miller's information on Kijiji, so people can contact him with problems, do they?
July 7, 2010 at 8:13 PM
bwahahaha... pretty funny stuff.
you know why you get treated the way you do in the forums. Day after day people come in there and post their complaints and claim 100% innocence and day after day it turns out they were at fault. It is so rare to see someone come in who knows the rules and acts like an adult that it is darn near unknown most months.
Everyone starts off their complaints by posting rants with 30! after every sentence and calling names or just generally being insulting and then act all surprised and insulted when they get as good as they gave lol
Personally I'm surprised the mods show the patience they do. lol
July 8, 2010 at 12:07 AM
That's right. It's always best for moderators to attack a customer because that customer is frustrated...I hope you hear the sarcasm.
I truly think they should teach Customer Service 101 in the high schools.
September 14, 2010 at 3:10 PM
Hey guys, I went to sign onto Kijiji this morning and was told that I was BLOCKED. I hadn't received an email as to why so I'm left guessing.
I raise dogs in Central Alberta -- Central Alberta, that's half way between Edmonton and Calgary, about an hour from either city. I LOVE that Kijiji is LOCAL but they don't seem to realize what Local really is. Someone in Calgary North can be on my doorstep quicker than they can drive to the South end of Calgary!! Kijiji has really became TOO local. One moderator had told me that as long as I picked one of the two major cities that the ads would not be pulled but that didn't last for too long.
My ads were pulled with no REAL explanation -- I'd had them pulled earlier in the year for the same old reasons -- I'd broke one of the Kijiji rules but I can't figure out which one???
I have a permit to operate my Kennel in the county in which I live. I had to go in front of our ELECTED municipal officers inorder to get a permission to operate my kennel and meet several requirements to do so. I have been visted by the Alberta SPCA and they have found nothing wrong with my Kennel. I do raise a few different types of dogs (crossbreeds like Labradoodles and Puggles) -- I don't believe in putting all of the proverbial eggs in one basket!! but they are raised humanely, fed good food and receive veterinary care when they need it. We live on a farm so they get lots of exercise.
It really burns me when I've tried to contact Kijiji and got no response from them. It bothers me that anyone can flag an ad for whatever reason and the poster has no recourse!
Sorry about the rant but my pups are getting older and they'd really like to get into homes where they can be the only show in town!!
October 29, 2010 at 4:46 PM
Banned too........
I am an Ontario recruiter with good paying legit jobs to offer in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.....
But you arent allowed to post the jobs.....if you dont live there.
So unless I live in Hinton Alberta: population 10k.......I cant tell anyone there is a job open
Canadians desperate for jobs.......and Kijiji
nah..they dont care......it violates a RULE
They sure are out of touch with what Canadians really want and need.
November 13, 2010 at 5:12 PM
Isn't it sad when some no name volunteers have the power to use Kijiji to express their personal views. Most people are not breaking any laws when posting ads, pets, homes and more, it boils down to people being able to make decisions based on their own bias. I am a legal papered kennel and use kijiji to sell my pups. I get my ads pulled for no reason what so ever, then you go to the forum and read all of this Holier then now no names going on about breeders and puppy mills and so on. I can guarantee these volunteers sit at computers all day, never getting out in the real world to see what really goes on, animal activists. Ha, my butt. I am so frustrated with the ignorance from these non responsive people I have started using other advertising sites and getting no slack and great response to my ads. I hope Kijiji gets what is coming to them and dwindles away to nothing. Crazy! Who do they think they are???
July 15, 2011 at 10:33 PM
Bit you guys all! I had my life threatened because of KIJIJI
Had my personal information posted online, had my full name and FULL ADDRESS posted by a ridiculous woman, competition in the same business, and KIJIJI never removed the adds she posted, however they did deleted my add and blocked me!!! I had to start legal action and when I involved their head quarter in Holland- Amerstdan, all my adds where reposted, however damaged was already done in a such matter that RCMP started to arrested people because my house had being vandalize as KIJIJI allowed the add with my information to run for days, inspite of all the reporting we had done.
July 15, 2011 at 10:37 PM
I just wonder if we can start a petition of same sort , or put a group of 'DELETED" people together to do same thing about this
September 5, 2011 at 7:36 PM
Anyone can creat a free petition on
www.thepetitionsite.com
September 5, 2011 at 7:54 PM
The petition could be on people that are blocked or banned. Kijiji when asked " Why am I blocked or banned ? " never bother getting back to you.What bothers me the most, is when I have done nothing wrong, that I am aware of and my ad is pulled.I hope that one day, there will be some other company, that we will be able to advertise with for free, that will have respect for it's customers.
September 9, 2011 at 6:58 AM
What other sites would be the best to advertise puppies for sale ? I give up on kijij, as everyone mentioned, I was blocked, then banned.I continued to write to them for 2 & 1/2 months.I finally get a reply that there had been a fair amount of people complaining that I was bothering.Like I told them, that's the worst comment that I have ever heard.I challenged them, to give me the amount of people that had actually complained.Needless to say, I have never heard from them again.Goodbye kijiji
December 19, 2011 at 9:49 AM
Im going to a lawyer today to talk to him. Were going to sue Kijiji. If anyone would like in please email me at celis_transport@hotmail.com. This article is going to help in the case. Thank you.
May 23, 2012 at 2:21 AM
Kijiji blocked me for no reason....a moderator said it was random and then wanted my personal info to prove I lived in Canada to unblock me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
October 14, 2012 at 3:32 AM
Kijiji deleted one of my ads saying I used more than 1 email account to post a similar Ad. This is not true at all. I only have 1 email id. We are a furniture store so we have around 10-15 Ads at a time (all posted on different dates) for 10-15 different sofas that all have different prices and different sale promotions going on. Each sofa is unique in it's own way. We keep paying Kijiji a lot of money to bump-up our Ad or post an Ad as a Top Ad, but just 1 Ad got deleted with the above reason cited and it doesn't make sense at all. We still don't understand the real reason for the Ad deletion. We strongly suspect that a competitor might have reported the ad and it might have got deleted as a result but this is wrong. The moderators should have checked first if we are indeed duplicating an Ad or not. We still don't know the real reason why the Ad was deleted. Was it a robot doing it or whether a human deleted it. All we know is on a busy weekend, we lost out of advertising for our 1 particular sofa because Kijiji "thought" that the Ad is duplicate when it actually wasn't. Nothing was done to resolve it. Is there really a class-action suite against Kijiji as we are paid customers of Kijiji, it's not free for the dealers as we spend $500-$600 a month on Kijiji advertising to follow the rules and thus bump-in up the Ads - not the same as our competitors who always delete their ads and repost thus violating the Kijiji terms. However, their Ads never get deleted. It looks like discrimination to us and we are disappointed that in spite of paying Kijiji upwards of $10K in the past year, they decided to do this to us and noone cares of answer to the support tickets created via their help form. I can't believe they don't have a phone number where one can reach a "real" human being to resolve any issue.
October 14, 2012 at 3:37 AM
Is there a judge in Canada, who could "ban" or "block" Kijiji for a week or 2 weeks. Maybe when they lose out on all the revenue from the top-ads and bump-ups then they could realize that they actually need to change, and put some real and trained professional customer support representatives who actually know how to deal with customers rather than having 12-14 year old students as moderators who have no clue about customer support. Why is there no website that can actually work nicely for both consumers and for sellers without having to deal with 12-14 year old moderators or no phone number at all to resolve any issues caused by their own people.
December 10, 2012 at 12:15 PM
So, I'm the latest victim of this bullshit site. trying to sell some overstocked phones and ipads and they delete my ad without any reasons why.
now mind you it seems as easy as just to start another email, change your ip address (if your on fibre op its really easy to do) and change your computer name and everything works again. but thats a HUGE pain in the ass.
If you guys want to start some sort of legal action, please involve me as im tired of the crap myself!
April 24, 2013 at 2:29 PM
I just wanted to sell my air conditioner and they keep saying I am breaking their rules which is not true I am an honest person.. I too cannot contact them even with a ticket number.........forget it will use Craigs list or the newspaper....very FRUSTRATING!!!!!!!!!!!
January 23, 2014 at 8:18 PM
Kijiji can ban whoever they like for whatever reason. Sue them? That's BS. No lawyer will take that on contingency that's for sure. One might soak you for legal fees but they will stop before actually filing a case because they can be removed from the bar for that kind of nonsense. You sir, are not telling the whole story.
May 22, 2014 at 12:56 PM
Well here we are 4 years later and you think kijiji would have addressed the problems and concerns above...they haven't. they are getting worse instead of better. There are 3 people using a computer and internet connection at our residence. We post our own ads with our own email addresses. Guess what? All ads get pulled because of the different addresses. For us to share 1 unique address is a pain and makes us go over the 25 ad limit. I started using usedeverywhere.com as an alternative just pick your cities and post. Hopefully more people will start using it instead of kijiji. Maybe kijiji will get a clue by then if it won't be too late.
May 25, 2016 at 12:24 AM
Ah yes, Kijiji tales of woe.
Where do I begin?
Let's start at the spam problem.
To make a long story short, I 'shop' on Kijiji as soon as I'm done work, in case there's something I'd like to buy before I finally head home. To clarify, I'm looking for a carpet cleaner unit, so I entered that into the search. Well, my eyes were full of spam by multiple d-bags spamming their carpet cleaning 'services' for about three pages worth. F***, was I irate, so I reported said ads, thinking they would be gone by the next day. The next night, the same ads were there, so I reported them again of course. Let's just say the ads were there for the next week. I reported them again asking if anyone actually read the reports or not, if nothing was ever done (talked to a few people who tried reporting ads to no avail) that the report link should be removed. Ohhhh, ouch. Guess what? I was banned. Yes, not the spammers, but only me. I won't delve into details to feed spammers, but let's just say the average person wouldn't know it asides from responding to every ad on Kijiji, but never receiving a reply. Hmm. Yes, very sly of them indeed, but I'm an IT guy who can easily apply a fix and carry on, however, I'm really irate at the unprofessionalism of that f***ing spammy site and won't bother feeding their ad revenue much longer. Some of the idiot spammers had three pages of clone ads. Pathetic! I find it utter ridiculous that a person must waste their time wading through all the daily spam that is compiled on top of the day before, then typing out a so-called report which the person is ignored anyways... finally, calling out the lack of compliance with being banned in return. Go figure! That site obviously caters to spammers and doesn't give a damn about shoppers or other sellers who follow the rules while being butt out of line by obnoxious spammers. I happen to use eBay often and I am dismayed that Kijiji is owned by them. Deeply childish and unprofessional that they can't hire teens to do any simple tasks. Why they got rid of volunteer moderators, I don't know, but it has really gone downhill since and quickly becoming a cesspool of spam.
Nice that Kijiji f***ed with the work computer after I complained and outed the modem/router MAC, but they evidently don't do that to spammers. For shame. Utterly pathetic.
Of course, they didn't respond back to an email to the 'help desk'. They'd likely tell me to f*** off in French anyways. Bratty kids these days!
May 21, 2017 at 8:06 AM
It used to be for local sellers/users. Now a lot of the ads are for products over 100 km away. And what about being filled with ads for Oakley sunglasses, Canada Goose coats, handbags and phony Macbook Retina ads. I keep flagging them with,
Why can't Kijiji block these annoying ads???
I'm sick of them.
February 12, 2018 at 7:24 PM
Good luck getting anywhere with those idiot Spamijiji mods who love to ignore reporting because it must be actual work to delete duplicate/triplicate/quad ads. To be quite blunt, I don't know why there's a reporting/flagging system anyways, must be just another useless source for click revenue.
Remember kids, complaining to Spamijiji mods will get you sneakily banned from using their messaging system, so you won't get a head's up that your replies to ads are not going through. Yes, it's a disturbingly childish, immature run company and surely an embarrassment to be associated with eBay. Banishment is relatively easy to correct with Telus (do a router-modem reset, but not so much with Shaw now with the Hitron unless you bridge the router-modem via ip pass through. I'd go with Telus if you like to give the lazy mods a piece of your mind. ;)
December 19, 2018 at 10:26 AM
We need to find a better ad posting vehicle than Kijiji. It's gone so far downhill as to be pretty much useless to the average home user. It now seem to simply be full of commercial sellers with hundreds of ads. Good luck getting your $10.00 toaster ad even seen now. Worse yet is something I'm seeing now which makes no sense whatsoever. I post fairly regularly under my city and under a certain heading. I log in and see that Kijiji states my ad is on page one. (for example) I then log out and do a search for my ad under my city again and under the same heading. Sometimes I can find my ad way back on the last page (after Kijiji stating it's on page one) but more likely what happens is after viewing several pages of commercial ads often a couple hundred Km away, My ad is not there at all. I log back in to check and it again says page one.
Hopeless really. So
KIJIJI YOU SUCK
Post a Comment