Coffee a restricted item?

[jacar_73660]

Hi.  I have a interesting situation I wanted to see if anyone has any feedback on.  I was offering some limited edition coffee pods.  My price was below most of the other one's that had already sold and I offered free shipping.  I sold one box and then received a price gouging message from ebay and the items were removed.  Besides the fact that mine were below the other sold items price, I understood that price gouging applied in emergency essential items or speculations.  Granted for some coffee is an essential item hehe but that was weird.  So I contacted customer service and the issue switched to I was not an authorized seller for that item.  So I asked if the agent was telling me that you now had to be authorized to sell coffee.  After some mumbling she  said yes.  But she was going to have her supervisor call me and explain, didn't happen.  I asked why other people were able to sell and how to be authorized and was told she would be taking them all down and there were no guidelines for authorization yet but don't worry I'd be hearing from ebay with an outcome.  Well I am worried. has this happened to anyone else?  any ideas what's going on?

[dbfolks166mt]

     Customer service is basically useless these days and they flat out lied to you to get you off the line. I am assuming these were the Dunkin K-cups of which there are about 800 current active listings. You will never hear back from eBay regarding this issue because they probably don't have a solid legitimate answer for you nor do they really know what is going on. 

     Just don't  relist the item, sell them locally on some other forum and move on. Why spend the time and effort on fighting a loosing battle. 

[luckythewinner]

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The eBay price-gouging policy is here:

https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-items/price-gouging-policy?id=5106

It says:

"eBay may restrict the sale of items that are susceptible to price gouging behavior - for example, by only allowing items to be sold by authorized sellers"

It's possible that eBay might be starting to do that with coffee.

It could also be that something about your listing triggered a bot into thinking you were selling something else. 

[donsdetour]

Since he pandemic: some sellers are in and others can not do so because they are not authorized to:

This is most likly what happened to you.

Do not relist it.