Just to follow up on our discussions of last month about the major toy retailer and their continued use of offsite links, their current listings do serve to confirm that they're free to continue embedding links to their own website as desired, whereas lesser sellers may get hammered for embedding offsite links or otherwise arranging offsite sales.
(When this was first brought up, several of the referenced listings were quickly edited to remove the offending links, but then edited again a week or so later, at which time the links went back in again. It's not clear whether the reinstatements were done deliberately, or were the result of uploading a new copy of a listing template that itself was never revised.)
For example, several current eBay listings of theirs reading "Find Fisher-Price products right here!" use "here!" as a hyperlink to their own website, and clicking on that takes you immediately to a catalog page of 835 more Fisher-Price products available for purchase from them, not you. Goodbye, eBay customer!
To be clear, not every listing of theirs is attempting this stunt; it seems to be limited to only listings for major brands and product lines (e.g. Fisher-Price, Thomas & Friends), for which they have their own catalog on their own website. They troll for interested customers on eBay, and then bring them in to the catalog on their own website, where the former eBay customer can now purchase that item and/or others direct from them.
The point here is not only that this seems to confirm the widespread perception that bigger sellers are allowed to ignore rules that lesser sellers must observe (that's not really surprising), but also that at least some of this ignored listing abuse doesn't even benefit eBay. Once a customer heads off to your competitor's website to make his purchases, how much eBay income goes with him?
