Competitor with 6 duplicate fixed price listings
Summary: thatsuccs expresses frustration with a large competitor dominating eBay search results through duplicate listings. Despite multiple reports and attempts to get eBay to enforce their policy against duplicate listings, no action has been taken. rynari and rhyobrie2 share similar experiences, noting that eBay seems unresponsive and driven by profit rather than fair policy enforcement. thatsuccs also mentions frustration with eBay allowing international sellers to bypass regulations. rhyobrie2 discusses challenges with drop shippers and eBay's inconsistency in policy enforcement, leading to significant sales loss and stress.
Hello everyone,
I noticed a competitor has 6 identical fixed price listings, albeit with slightly tweaked photos and titles, offering the exact same product, exact same quantities etc.
Essentially they've monopolised the search rankings as all their duplicates are taking up all the sponsored listing slots which means I'm pretty much frozen out of the search. They are a huge company and I am very small; I can't compete with their advertising budget and I've already lowered my price to try and gain some of my buyers back.
I've made reports about each listing last week and again this week. I've called customer services but nothing I do is working to get their duplicates removed. Some of the duplicates have thousands of sales so they're pretty long-standing.
Does anyone know how to get eBay to actually enforce their policy on duplicate listings?
rhyobrie2
·2 weeks agoSo I've had the same on a larger scale so there's a seller I've been competing with for the last 3 years. We both sell a item with has multiple colours as ebay states it should be all kept to one listing on one store.
The seller started to make more and more listings to flood me out, in the end there was over 130 listings for this product in 15 colours. So out of all the search results 130 out of 150 was his. Some was multiple variations some was singles both split between two stores charging different prices.
I made a spread sheet for example the product in black would be on 20 listings, the item in blue in 15 listings and so on. I counted 200 duplicates. He also had about 10 duplicate listings for every item on his store but this seller hated me with a passion.
reported via the report button on the listing with clear evidence and nothing
reported via live chat and nothing
reported via phonecall and nothing
reported via sending a letter to the UK head office and nothing
reported via executive relations and nothing
Each time i reported it they said it was a blatant breach of the policies and they sent the report along with my spreadsheet with every single item id and one what listing each product is linked to the people who deal with it.
This has been going on for 3 years.
Ebay does not care they are just in it for the money, have you read the new terms and conditions? if i remember rightly they said they was no longer going to look for bad listings. It seems like the entire platform is going AI even the support agents are using AI to generate simple responses to me while talking to them in support
thatsuccs
OP2 weeks agoBlimey, and I thought I had it bad.
The fee revenue is clearly just too lucrative for eBay to be motivated to enforce their own policy. At this point, I feel that the duplicate listing policy is nothing more than lip service; relatively tiny sellers like me and you are forced to race to the bottom while the whales sit at the top completely shielded by their monopoly.
A lot of my other competitors are based in China and they also flood the UK market with CITES protected plant species. The Plant Health Inspectorate are absolutely toothless in stopping eBay from allowing these international sellers to smuggle endangered species into the UK market and eBay have no incentive to stop it because that juicy fee money is just too good.
As an APHA registered plant business, if I tried to smuggle in endangered plant material I would be slapped with a £30000 fine and banned from trading. My eBay account is restricted to UK only selling yet there seems to be no restrictions on the reverse.
Perhaps if I was the size of my competitors things would be different for me...
rhyobrie2
·2 weeks agoYep, doesn't surprise me ebay are doing nothing, those big companies would get away with it especially with how inactive ebay is, my issue now is drop shippers from a certain stan county pretending to be in the uk, every day i have someone beating my prices on something i import thousands while being the UKs leading seller of that specific item and selling it at a price where im breaking even and struggling even when ebay is shown full tracking not the last mile tracking they took a few down but it did cost me money on my end.
I recently was hit with a tobacco violation, one of the drop shippers obviously reported it seems like ebay takes that one kinda seriously and now im going to be down £4000 in sales before fees this year, my biggest money earner, i have to sign up to verifymyage to get it back but heres the kicker!
I tested all my tobacco related products and reported the drop shippers for the tobacco policy violation the same as i was done for, on this specific item 8/10 had their listings removed the other 2 listings ebay saw no issue with them.
The 4 other different items i have i reported the dropshippers for the same violation 0 action taken, i appealed and was rejected again. If i signed up to verifymyage these products i would have to pay a extra 55p in fees per item sold.
Sorry if its a bit all over the place i finished a nightshift 6 hours ago XD
But if i add age verification to my store it would mean all 4 items will have it automatically added and i would pay 55p per item sold but ebay only police one of the four items. So that would mean to get my listing back i would have to pay 55p per item sold on all four listings just to be able to keep selling the product i had removed. I would lose i reckon 80% of sales store wide because people don't like that age verification because its a pain and they would just use the dropshippers instead because they would be a lot cleaper. The age verification is rubbish anyway it checked my id once like 5 years ago at least and never checked it again.
And with this new UK age verification ebay should be doing it themselves but for the last few years have been forcing sellers to use this verifymyage site.
Ebay is a 18+ site it should have its own verification. From what I've also heard is the fee is per item sold so when dealing with lots of multibuy sales on low value items that fee racks up pretty fast.
for a £12 order after multibuy discounts for of the same item
£2.70 postage
£3 in ebay fees
£1.80 in costs
i would get back £4.4 then after the age verification £2.2 then also the 80% loss of sales store wide. Honestly debating closing i was shacking with anger and have had hardly any sleep the last few days because of the amount of stress the whole situations caused me when i kicked off at ebay they stopped my traffic for 2 days, I'm not sure what to do now 5 years of my life so much stress and now this might be the final blow. If ebay actually did what they are meant to do there would be no issues but they do nothing apart from milk us.
onlineflowerseeds
·1 week agoMy competition buys my listings and resells them on ebay
That is two lots of ebay fees for ebay
No chance of returns
No complaining to deal with
You are right , ebay don`t care and why should they .
They are a business trying to make money and employ staff
Would you sit at a desk and listen to the same complaint from the same person in 6 different ways ? on a daily basis ?
I dont know how the reps deal with it .
They must be working remotely on a beach in BALI sipping a pint of Fosters
rynari
·2 weeks ago · EditedEbay will not do a thing.
jonatjonatjonat
·2 weeks agoebay unfortunately don't tend to enforce much if anything these days. all we seem to see on the forums are reports where ebay don't find listings to be an issue if a report is made.