Hey everyone! We’ve been selling on eBay for some time now. Our feedback is pretty good (99.4%), we are top-rated and overall do a pretty good job or disclosing everything in ours listings and such… Anyways, 2 days ago eBay notified us that we were going to be banned for 7 days due to a counterfeit item policy. This was not the VeRo program, this was internal eBay. The reasons its 7 days is obviously we’ve had an offense before (Back in January we were banned for 3 days for failing to use the word MFi with Apple Products, and then further forgot to fix all of our listings which led in our warning leading to a suspension). Anyways… that was a VeRo offense for counterfeit item - even though it wasn’t counterfeit, we just forgot to use the word MFi in our listings, and our appeal failed and we were banned.
Fast forward to now. We listed a ‘YU33 Wireless Gaming Controller Compatible With PlayStation 4 - Purple’… The listing was removed for counterfeit item - and eBay told me they did it to ‘er on the side of caution’ and imposed a 7 day ban. We provided proof of purchase for the item, we correctly titled it with ‘Compatible With’ and we never used any coined Sony terms. They said that the controller image itself too closely replicated an actual PlayStation controller. However, it wasn’t exactly what a PlayStation controller looks like, and we just posted images of the controller itself. We bought it from Amazon initially (showed them our purchase receipt) and we were going to sell it on eBay. Boom. 7 day suspension not more than a day after listing it.
Funny thing is if you search YU33 controller for PS4, other people are selling this item with several of them sold with nothing happening to their listings - I know its not fair to compare - but my point is that we didn’t actually violate any rule and they literally told me they removed to to ‘er on the side caution’, and to avoid ‘a situation where it may create un-satisified buyers’ which seems absurd that they would issue me a 7 day ban for it, especially considering I didn’t actually violate any policy. This item has 1000s of them sold on Amazon, with over a 4-star review average.
They obviously denied all my appeals. All the reps just kept saying the same thing saying they couldn’t go into detail or know what was going on. Requested to physically talk on the phone with someone from that department, and got no response. One rep even told me you can submit an appeal but it wont do anything. Basically, the people I can talk to said they have no powers to change anything. The people I can’t talk to apparently have all that power. I’m still left with them saying I listed an item that violated a ‘counterfeit item’ policy with them having nothing to support - and like I said - I uploaded proof of purchase, images of the actual item, links to where the item was bought, images depicting design differences, used correct listing title practices, used correct item description/specifics section.
Is there anything I can do - or do I just bow to the dictatorship that is eBay? Because they’ve definitely considered me guilty of something they haven’t proved, in their own words ‘er on the side of caution and removed your listing’
Thanks!
P.S. You can also see we sell around 1500-3000 items a month, so we aren’t running a small operation on eBay which is why this is detrimental to our business and I’m here.
