Why do eBay vendors ship from Amazon?

Question

MANY recent orders from eBay have actually been shipped from Amazon.

If I wanted to buy from Amazon, I would go there. Instead I choose to buy from individuals on eBay, not monopolies like Amazon.

Is this permissible under eBay regs? If not, how do I report violations to eBay?

disneyshopper · Answer

Some sellers sell on both ebay and Amazon, and keep their inventory at Amazon warehouses, so items purchased on ebay may arrive with an Amazon label. These sellers are using FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon). That is okay with both ebay and Amazon. What is NOT okay is for a seller to use his Prime account to purchase the item on Amazon and have it shipped to the ebay buyer. You will know this if there is a Gift receipt in the package. You can report the seller to ebay as well as Amazon.

https://www.ebay.com/help/action?topicid=4022

1. The seller has violated one of eBay s policies
2. Seller's username
3. Other
4. Seller purchased item from Amazon and had it sent to me as a gift.

Submit.

eburtonlab · Answer

@wordsmithereens

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.