eBay Enterprise destroyed Fetchback

Fetchback was a display re-targeting company that was acquired by GSI Commerce in 2010. Then in 2011 eBay purchased GSI. I’ve known about re-targeting technology since its inception and it has been highly effective at “closing the sale” whether that be an actual sale or lead. If you’re reading you most likely are using the digital marketing channel and if you’re not I highly recommend investigating.

Way back in 2005 there were very few companies that offered this sort of technology. At that time Criteo had just started to get into the game and the re-targeting space was heating up including other companies like Dotomi and today we have newer companies like adRoll, Google, BuySight, Steelhouse, Perfect Audience and TellApart.

Fetchback was a smaller company at the time, located in Arizona. I preferred the smaller shop approach because the customer service was so much better than the larger houses at the time. Because of my large eCommerce network just about everybody and their uncle knows me including vendors. I reached out and a conversation started.

We (H2O Plus) signed up for Fetchback/eBay Enterprise in March 2013—at this time Fetchback was still fairly independent—meaning just about the only things that changed from their GSI purchase were the signatures on email and the website to read “FetchBack, a GSI Commerce Company”. Great!

However, things rapidly changed from the time we signed the initial IO back in March 2013. To be fair here, H2O Plus is a niche luxury skincare company. We have amazing products but our distribution is limited and the amount of volume/budget we handle isn’t anywhere near the enterprise levels I have managed in my prior career. We were a small account.

Things were fine until a series of distributing events started to happen:

+Voicemails on the 800# with fetchback never received a response (I wasn’t aware that a larger corporation would allow a voicemail on a 800#)

+Called previous account managers with no response

+Called/Emailed our previous sales rep with no response

Every attempt to contact anyone at eBay Enterprise received zero response. Nothing. It was as if someone had unplugged their connection to humanity. In response we paused our online account ads and I informed our AP department to freeze Fetchback payments.

The strategy worked . Eventually. Months later an Accountant gal from “eBay Enterprise” contacted me regarding our past due account status. I communicated to her what had happened and was very nice helping me clear up the issue. In so many words she didn’t know what was happening with eBay Enterprise accounts but ours wasn’t the first to encounter this issue. All of my sales and support contacts at Fetcbhack and eBay Enterprise were “no longer with the company”.