China

Question

Why has EBay let the Chinese infiltrate us? Why does EBay continue to let these sellers continue to sell even with countless negative feedback railings. Is there a rule for how many feedback ratings you can have before your kicked off of EBay??

eburtonlab · Answer

@savwafair

Just because eBay has not closed a seller's account yet does not mean that you have to do business with that seller. You can decide to only buy from the best, most experienced and trustworthy seller accounts that meet your own personal feedback standards rather than any seller account that only barely exceeds the very low bar of not having been booted from the site yet.

eBay relies on reports from buyers, so eBay's disciplinary action will always be reactive and slow compared to individual buyers that can be proactive and that do not have to justify or explain any particular decision to buy or not.

As a buyer if you want all your searches to be limited to a "US only" or "North America" Item location by default, there is a way to accomplish this.

If you use the eBay app, you can do this by first enabling "Lockable Filters" in the Filter Customize menu. Then, select an item location filter option and you should see a lock icon appear. Tap the lock icon so it turns blue and locks to set that as your default search option. From then, all your searches should include that filter option until you unlock or change it.

Using a browser, the lockable filter option is not available. But if you use certain desktop browsers, you may be able to use a third party browser add-on called "eBay item location -- my country only" which allows you to override eBay's "default" item location setting.

Note that when searching, if a US-only search finds few results, eBay may provide additional results after the formal search results, showing additional items available from international sellers. If you are scrolling quickly, you may miss the delineation between the two sections.

And of course, not all sellers ship from the Item location they specify as they should.

Probably the best way to deal with sellers that misrepresent item location is to avoid them. The "US only" item location filter selects items that are listed as being in the United States; however, as you have probably seen, not every seller that lists items in the US ships from the US as they should.

Before ordering you should check the estimated delivery dates -- that is a good indication of where items actually ship from. Also, going to a seller's profile page or feedback page will tell you where the seller's account was registered. Although some overseas sellers do use US warehouses to ship their items (and some registered US-sellers may employ overseas drop-shippers), if a seller is registered overseas, that raises the likelihood of an item shipping from outside the US, particularly for multiple quantity commodity items. Checking seller feedback will often reveal if there are problems with long shipping times, canceled orders or other supply chain warning signs.