The ebay warning message about selling off the platform is so threatening including 1) just straight up charging you the fees if you are caught or 2) banning your account
But based on my average user interaction, going off ebay seems to be a primary way a lot of buyers like to buy items
Maybe it’s more likely going to be something someone shares on a Facebook group, but like has any actually been charged the final value fee for selling off ebay? Or banned? Do you know of anyone? Are these just bluffs from ebay?
idk, but im not trying to find out lol. if an alternative method of establishing contact outside of ebay comes up (i.e. through here), then i’ll ofc take it, but when people ask me to email them or something to do a sale outside of ebay, i usually decline.
No. I think 99% of the time they just rely on their email filters. Burden of proof including actually proving a sale off platform sounds very time intensive and probably not worth their time or risk if they get it wrong. Plus they show me over and over they only want to ban known scammers and even that takes them a good bit before they do it.
I don’t know about having final value fees charged, but I swear I remember Rusty got a 1 week ban that disallowed him from adding new items to his store or placing bids. I don’t think they fully shut down his store during that ban though. This was maybe 8-10 years ago, he mentioned it in a YouTube video.
Don’t know how active he is on here to confirm though, @TCAGaming
That’s so interesting, they have narrowed it further than I last knew. Looks like they are capturing it under their broader user privacy scope rather than just practices, and can claim it is for user protection which is just damn silly if two people want to exchange info for say just social networking. Unless they are trying to also quash their potential liability if someone gets harmed. I know there was some big change years ago that affected a lot of sites due to stalky murdery incidents but I don’t keep up much on these things as I’m not so much into stalking and murdering anymore.
There is a filter that halts you from sending emails or external handles, which prevents the message from sending and I always thought it flags the conversation for possible staff review. But it might just stop at the automation and trust that the filter is doing its job. When I send people off eBay requests I include an innocuous message and include an attachment photo with my contact info in it.
Some sellers and I have gone so far as to roleplay rejections because they were so nervous.
To support this, I had a one time warning on my ebay account due to suspicion that I was trying to sell offsite. Someone asked me if I was the same person on insta and I told them I was. We had a conversation on various things including selling. Around that same time I also removed some things for sale as I decided to keep them. Apparently this was enough to sound the bells on ebay and they said any further suspicion might result in a suspended account or ban. Granted this was years ago so not sure if anything changed.
However, when people reached out by other platforms and referenced my ebay page, having that outside conversation seemed inconsequential to ebay. Even when I’d remove items.
Best guess is that you share a convo on ebay about selling and mention other modes of correspondence. And then you remove stuff. It may send a flag to ebay in that sense.
Practically speaking, eBay’s only recourse is to ban users who do this from their platform. For obvious reasons, they’re disincentivized from doing this, especially for big sellers and buyers.
