L’Oreal argued that restricting the distribution of their products and preventing them from being sold on eBay protected consumers against counterfeit products. In court, of the 15 products hand-selected by L’Oreal as evidence against eBay UK, none was proven to be counterfeit.
Most of us know that the big brands are trying to control the market ,it has nothing to do with Fakes at all .

“Dear Seller, sorry, please don’t list that stuff any more” would have been more than an adequate response from eBay instead of the very harsh policy warning that the seller advised she had recieved.

Where I have the *really* big problem is the penalties that eBay imposes. They know this false brand protection goes on; in many cases, they know which companies are doing it – and yet they penalise sellers for it. If the situation were handled more pragmatically – “Dear Seller, sorry, please don’t list that stuff any more” in the first instance – rather than a great big policy violation and the threat of losing your account straight off – this would be much less of a problem.

And what is really needed, of course, is a re-seller big enough to take on the big brand owners, who is prepared to go to court to defend their right to re-sell. With the way eBay is moving towards favouring larger sellers, perhaps this day is not so far off now.

Shouldn’t eBay be policing their site, not us?

And what’s the point? You report it to eBay, you have no idea whether eBay have done anything about it. And even if they do pull the listing, the seller simply relists it.

We only sell genuine merchandise, but we’ve spoken in the past to eBay about competitors selling fakes, and they do not care. Why would they really want to when they’re making millions of dollars out of it.

@10 Totally agree. Unfortunately, as our competitors get more desperate, we’re finding more and more listings are getting pulled. We had 4 pulled overnight for Copyright Violation, and I know we haven’t done anything wrong. It would be nice to have the chance to defend our listings before someone at eBay removes them.

If they buy one of mine and determine its fake thats one thing. If they pull my listing because they think its fake, thats a problem because everything I sell is real.

I have a hunch that the shopping centre has a lot more money than the shop though.

L’Oréal need to go after the people who are selling the fakes, not the market place which provides the shops.

If you have a shopping centre in your town, and one of the small shops sells something that is fake, the brand wouldn’t sue the shopping centre, they sue the shop.

Brands should work closer with ebay which is a more practicle model to identify what potentially could be fakes.

I suggest that for specific brands, images should identify some aspect of the product to identify if that infact is genuine.

If Tescos were selling fake clothes etc, they would be held accountable. And before you say that eBay only provide a venue for us to sell goods on where as Tescos source the products themselves, you would be wrong.

Many areas inside large superstores are leased out to vendors. Tescos know they have a duty to vet those vendors, as do eBay.

At the end of the day, eBay/Paypal are processing the sale of fake goods so they should share some of the blame. The fact that it’s very hard to remove all fakes from the site doesn’t count for squat!