Ebay purchase received from Amazon

Question

I purchased an item on Ebay. It shipped with no tracking provided and several days later a package arrived from Amazon. Nothing in the package made any reference to Ebay or the seller I purchased it from.

I found the exact same product on Amazon an it appears the Ebay seller up-charged me 40% and had Amazon do the delivery. They make no mention of this in their listing, only that they may use alternative carriers (e.g. USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.).

Does this violate any Ebay policies? Is it common practice now?

eburtonlab · Answer

@craftsman393

It may not be possible to always identify in advance those sellers who drop-ship, but it is possible to identify some common characteristics of illicit retail drop-shippers or other under-performing sellers, and thus avoid the worst of them.

Often they can be spotted by a combination of low feedback number, free shipping of heavy items where it would not be profitable to use retail shipping, use of stock photos, high handling time (not necessarily if they are using Amazon or Walmart, though), poor feedback received with complaints of delays and wrong items or out of stock cancellations, very odd item selection and/or quantities like items were chosen at random from a catalog, canned item descriptions scraped from another site that exactly match many other similar listings, differences between registration location on the feedback page and item location (or vague item location -- like "US, United States"), or inability to answer even basic questions about the items being sold.