Sellers should police 3rd party ad pirates, say eBay
30/12/2008 at 11:37
Since eBay began running ads in search results, we’ve heard of a few eyebrow-raising things advertised there. There were the weed seeds. There are not-infrequently pirate music CDs, DVDs, knock-off designer clothing and handbags. This week, a poster on the UK PowerSeller Board spotted some Wii games advertised for just £4 each being sold by a Chinese website; he may just be right that these are dodgy.
And he got a response from James, eBay UK’s community manager, who said:
I presume then that after you posted here you reported the link you saw so that we can have it removed? I’m not sure if you’ve seen the previous posts on this (there have been a few though) that set out that we don’t actually provide the links that appear there and when we become aware of links that are unsuitable, we work to get them removed and make sure they don’t reappear.
That’s right: the responsibility for policing eBay’s third party ads for illegal content is not eBay’s, nor that of the company who supply the ads, but that of site users. Even by eBay’s standards, this is astonishingly crass.
board_surfer says
11:58 am on 30/12/2008
Amazes me that folk actually think ebay care what adverts appear.
There is no way they are going to police what links appear.
They will always leave to the righteous band of users to do that for free.
Ebays cheapest resource is their users, they will always leave stuff like this to them to report.
If you want ebay to police the site simply do not report anything, eventually they will do it themselves, it will cost you though.
Kiss-and-Make-up says
12:10 pm on 30/12/2008
I agree with Board_surfer, if eBay were worried about the ads they would actively do something about it themselves, instead they pass the buck to sellers to police for them.
Also, I lost count of the amount of posts on the board from PS’s reporting dodgy listings that were still running despite repeated reports, I don’t see how reporting the ads will be any different to be honest.
whirly says
12:25 pm on 30/12/2008
eBay couldn’t give a donkey where the next $ comes from as long as its a $.
Honestly, if anyone thinks for one minute I am going to waste one nano second of my life reporting that rubbish they are seriously misguided.
It’s much more fun cut’pasting them onto forums to highlight the stupidity and lazy ass attitude eBay have towards building a better site for the future.
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Jimbo says
1:17 pm on 30/12/2008
“the righteous band of users”
love it.
Perhaps the “Power Sellers board” should be renamed “The board of indignation”.
Paul Platten says
12:48 am on 31/12/2008
The sooner we can all take advantage of Adcommerce to dilute these unnecessary links the better.
Every time I do a search on Toho seed beads I really feel tempted to book a trip to Toho (wherever that might be) via the link that appears…