Well then, what would you do as the worlds biggest online auction company? Take care that your customers stay satisfied and ensure reliable online services? Well that's a good guess, but eventually it's not really what eBay did.

At least this is the way it appears to me, let's make a short list what doesn't work at the moment on ebay.de:

• Changing your email address

  This has been broken for at least two years, jepp, kind of embarrassing. You have to contact their pretty annoying customer support.

• Calculating the shipping costs

  I had a few auctions going on over the last weeks and I had to correct ANY automated email they sent out, since it was all messed up. How hard can it be to look up the items location and then take the shipping option? Congratulations.

• Paying via their official (sigh) interface is partially broken

  Ok, this is the first time I ran into this. Let's assume you bought twenty items of a kind. Then, since the seller offered special shipping options you want to use the online interface, just by the book and this is what you get:

  

  The second popup came after clicking on the "help" link. I tried deleting cookies, renewing the login, different browsers, etc. To whom do I send my invoice now?

Oh, and just for the record - when I log into ebay.co.uk, it all just works.