eBay sellers for Amazon should have to declare their connection.

Question

For political reasons and the abhorrent greed of Jeff Bezos I’ve chosen not to give Amazon my business. I was very disappointed to see a recent eBay order was fulfilled by Amazon. Sellers should have to clearly state in their listing they are an Amazon vendor. I guess I’ll have to stop buying from eBay too.

mudshark61369 · Accepted Answer

@lcaywood550 ,When you go to a brick and mortar store do you ask them where they source their products from? If not then you may be supporting foreign governments that violate human rights, are known for producing counterfeit items in contravention of international copyright laws and do not disclose the use of dangerous materials in their products... all just to make money. Because there are others who feel the way you do about Amazon, if you check a seller's feedback profile you are likely to f...

gosimus · Answer

@lcaywood550 < For political reasons and the abhorrent greed of Jeff Bezos I’ve chosen not to give Amazon my business . . . I guess I’ll have to stop buying from eBay too. > I guess you'd better consider crossing Walmart off your list, too. Sam Walton was known to pursue making a profit. If you put your mind to it, you could probably add many more names to the list. Eventually you run out of any place at all to buy stuff.

eburtonlab · Answer

Some of the sellers that hide the fact that they are sourcing their products from Amazon do so because they are violating eBay and Amazon policies by waiting for an eBay order to be placed, then making a retail purchase on Amazon to have the item shipped directly to the eBay buyer, often using a Prime account for commercial purposes against Amazon policy. Typically, those are the packages that come in an Amazon box with a gift receipt.

If those sellers are already violating eBay policies and hiding that fact, creating a new eBay policy will not force them to reveal that. So buyers will have to look for other signs that that is what is going on.

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.