How to Make Millions Selling Supplements on eBay, A Beginner's Guide (Satire, Unfortunately) | Selling

sanban_9985 · 2026-07-08T06:55:36.550975Z

Step 1. Find a chinese supplier who will sell you a shipping container of identical clear yellow softgels. Don't ask what's in them. It doesn't matter. Palm oil, soybean oil, who knows — it's yellow, it's oily, it's cheap.Step 2. Ask an AI model to design you 200 supplement labels. CoQ10. Vitamin D3+K2. Calcium Magnesium Zinc. Glutathione. Saffron Extract. Beef Liver.Yes, beef liver—in a softgel filled with golden oil. I own a bottle. I paid $13.50 for it, but got a refund because beef liver supplements literally can’t stay in liquid form and seller stays quiet about all these claims, Not a single response.Step 3. Print the labels. Do not proofread them. My bottle says "BEEF FLIVER." Not liver. FLIVER. It sailed across an ocean like that. It cleared customs like that. It arrived at my door like that, in a bottle that also says "Vegan" while listing Gelatin as an ingredient, beneath a badge reading "FDA Approved" — a certification the FDA does not issue for dietary supplements, because it does not exist.Step 4. List all 200 products. Add "GMP Certified." Add "3rd Party Tested." Nobody checks.Step 5. Collect 99% positive feedback and 15,000+ sales. This is the beautiful part. Nobody can taste the difference between real glutathione and cheap oil. Nobody feels a placebo failing. The handful of buyers who notice request a refund, get one quietly, and go away. The seller stops replying to messages. The listing stays up. The scam is not just profitable — it's self-cleaning.Step 6. Repeat under four more storefronts, in case one gets flagged.Now the part that isn't a joke.Desiccated beef liver is a dry, dark brown powder. It is not oil-soluble. It cannot be a clear golden liquid. This isn't a matter of quality or sourcing or opinion — a golden oil softgel labeled "beef liver" is physically not beef liver, the way a bottle of water labeled "brick" is not a brick. Same for calcium. Same for magnesium. Same for glutathione. These are powders and salts, not oils.So when I browse a storefront and see the same identical yellow softgel photographed inside bottles for a dozen chemically unrelated products, that is not a coincidence I need a laboratory to investigate. The seller has already told me. It's in their own listing photos.And this isn't one store. Once you learn to spot the softgel, you see it everywhere — near-identical catalogs, near-identical badge stickers, near-identical stock photos, hundreds of SKUs each.Here is my actual question for eBay.I'm not asking you to police the entire platform. I understand the scale. But these are ingestible products, and the failure mode isn't "buyer is disappointed" — it's a person with a soy or fish allergy swallowing an unidentified oil, or someone avoiding animal products taking gelatin, or a person substituting mystery oil for a supplement they actually need.Surely, for the supplements category specifically, an automated check could flag:"FDA Approved" on a dietary supplement listing — a phrase that is false by definition, every single timeListings claiming Vegan while listing gelatin as an ingredientA single storefront listing 200+ chemically distinct supplements that all appear as the same softgelLabels where the product name is misspelled in the product photoEvery one of those is a string match or an image comparison. None requires a chemist. The last one requires a spellchecker.eBay was, for a long time, the platform where this couldn't happen. I got my refund — I'm not here about $13.50. I'm here because I now genuinely cannot buy a supplement on this site, and I don't think that's the outcome anyone wants. "Just don't buy supplements on eBay" is not a solution. It's a surrender.Has anyone found a reporting channel that actually results in a catalog-level review rather than a single listing being quietly relisted the next day?

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How to Make Millions Selling Supplements on eBay, A Beginner's Guide (Satire, Unfortunately) | Selling | eBay Community