@outfittersupport wrote:So I just want to make sure EVERYONE knows who sells here that eBay can and will pick/chose at times to pull your items if they deem so. So if there is a competitor that sells items that are the same as yours or similar, he can just flag your items and eBay will pull them even if their already sold (preventing you from the sale) AND not allow you to relist them either - based on a simple click by a competitor. This is going on right now with me and it affecting my livelihood, creates a disgusting untrustworthy environment for selling on eBay, and eBay doesn't want to help and said no comments can be made further? Also eBay was absolutely wrong about why they did what they did and can't undue what has been done, and I'm left with: "no comments can be made further on the situation" - as a upset seller?? What in the f**k?
Can someone explain how this policy doesn't infringe on the fair trade policy ? This is corruption
The phenomenon you describe is not unique to eBay. When I sold on Amazon 10 -15 years ago, the seller boards there were peppered with stories daily about how Chinese merchants had managed to drive American sellers off the platform using all sorts of "black hat" tactics. Some American sellers reported that their entire catalogue of listings had been hijacked by someone in Beijing. As far as I know, to this very day, Amazon has yet to resolve this problem.
More generally, this sort of manipulation affects niche products ("trading cards") that appeal to a relatively small subset of the buying public and over which there is, for reasons that escape me, intense competition.
I've sold on eBay for 25 years and have chose extremely boring but highly lucrative categories that (a) appeal to older, wealthier American consumers and (b) which do not lend themselves to counterfeiting or claims of same.
The selling environment on eBay is mostly (but not wholly) untrustworthy, and that is why I personally have almost never purchased from this site. There is ZERO quality control in the seller onboarding process. It takes perhaps a dozen bad buyer experiences for bad sellers to lose their accounts.
I think that you are correct about how the algorithms work... the language in the listing violation report needs to be highly specific, so that a computer / AI can understand it unambiguously. And once the computer renders its verdict, there can be no going back, because computers do not exercise judgment. (Nor do the seller support staff at eBay.)
Not sure if this has been mentioned, but I have contacted facebook/ebay on occasion in the past and have received exceptionally good support from those folks. Have you contacted them?
As for legal recourse, there really is none. Read the eBay user agreement and in particular section 4, and you will see that by selling here, you have agreed essentially to forfeit all your rights:
