What’s With Ebay’s Selective Punishment Policy

It has come to our attention that Ebay is playing favorites. For some unknown reason Ebay favors some sellers and punishes others who are selling the exact same thing in the exact same way.

For instance, one seller contacted us and told us that Ebay seller “bugonservices” was selling the same article writing service that they were, yet they received a “Miscategorization of Digitally Delivered Goods” violation. They were told that they would have to place their listing using Ebay’s Classified Ads because the item they were selling was being delivered via email.

This didn’t really seem fair. A classified ad was $9.95 and a regular Ebay listing such as that used by bugonservices was $0.35. 

This poor seller even called Ebay to try to straighten things out by explaining that they were only trying to run the same type of ad as one of Ebay’s “Top-Rated Sellers”. At this point the Ebay rep tried to get this member to “rat out” the other sellers who had not been given the miscategorization violation. The member flatly refused even though they realized that it was possible that bugonservices themselves could have pointed Ebay to their listing to get them a violation in order to “eliminate the competition”

A similar situation arose with another seller. They informed us they were selling the same type of merchandise as Ebay seller “megatrend_fx” and received the same type of violation. Rather than having to advertise in the classified ads section like others who sell digitally delivered products “megatrend_fx” sell in the following Ebay category “Computers & Networking > Software > Personal Finance & Investing”. They even advertise that your product will be sent to your email address in zip file format!

Amazingly enough megatrend_fx is also an Ebay “Top-rated seller”.

What’s going on here? Do some sellers have friends at Ebay that help them eliminate the competition? Well, truthfully cannot say one way or the other, but the folks at Ebay need to get a clue and treat all sellers with an equal level of respect.