eBay is the biggest Western marketplace for fake/counterfeit goods and it is ignored.

[sanzibar17]

I'm sick of trying to make a living on eBay with genuine items only to be massively undercut by the amount of fake items on here. So I no longer bother.

Even dumping grounds like Temu, Shein, Alibaba and AliExpress can't use brand names anymore, but eBay allows fake branded (Sony, Lenovo, Mi, Samsung, Sandisk, Kingston etc.) to be sold.

Usually people realise too late or write it off as a £10 loss, bad experience.

What does eBay do to combat it? They ask you to report 10,000+ results one by one. What a joke and that has what eBay has become. A laughing stock of major proportions.

It's an outdated, unpoliced, security lax, unsafe, untrustworthy, criminal enterprise car boot sale with little interaction from humans. 

I sell on here but I WOULDN'T BLOODY BUY. No thanks, I'll shop on a trusted website.

I've tried to warn them but it falls on deaf ears.

[sanzibar17]

Don't know or care who the CEO of eBay and his team are but they are obviously as out of touch with its buyers and sellers as the British government is with its citizens.

[red_magpie]

They ask you to report 10,000+ results one by one.

No, this is no longer correct. In fact eBay doesn't even accept reports of counterfeits from users. Which is understandable, because their own staff are not qualified to determine whether items listed are counterfeit. 

eBay suggests that members who suspect that items are counterfeit should get in touch with the rights owner and encourage them to contact eBay. Quote: "Only intellectual property rights owners can report eBay listings that infringe on their copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property rights". If reported by the rights owner, eBay will (and does) remove them from sale.

For further information see: https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/listing-policies/selling-policies/intellectual-property-vero-pr....

Admittedly, eBay and the rights owners can't do much more than fire-fight istings already paced. What would stop counterfeits dead would be if buyers stopped buying them. But some actually look for fakes - a student once told me that her friends all buy on eBay because they can't afford the real thing, and just want something cheap that looks right. Other buyers either don't care or haven't bothered to read the warnings - that eBay does not guarantee that descriptions will be truthful or accurate or that items will be safe or legal. How much clearer does a warning have to be??

[sanzibar17]

Good advice.....but

"How much clearer does a warning have to be??" Newbie's and those who have never had to return items find eBay difficult to use. As a seller, over 50% of customers have to ask how to return things. They don't know about reporting as eBay hides it as 3 dots.

"They ask you to report 10,000+ results one by one. No, this is no longer correct."  That is exactly what 2 customer service reps told me to do over the phone.

"No, this is no longer correct. In fact eBay doesn't even accept reports of counterfeits from users." Yes it's correct. See photo.

"their own staff are not qualified to determine whether items listed are counterfeit." Sony, Mi and Lenovo do not manufacture 1TB or 2TB SD/micro SD cards or USB memory, yet there are 10,000+ for sale on eBay, so even the most basically trained staff can determine those listings are for fakes.

[red_magpie]

That is exactly what 2 customer service reps told me to do over the phone.

Customer support often doesn't know eBay's own rules. Just read the link to eBay's policy on counterfeits for yourself..

it's true that elsewhere in the site it still incorrectly says that counterfeits can be reported. But from what we hear from other users, reporting just produces a stock response that AI assisted investigation failed to determine any problem (or words to this effect).

I'm sure that eBay staff could be trained to recognise some fakes, but it isn't eBay's policy to review listings or their content.

You need to read section 2 of the user agreement. The real eBay is there, hiding in plain sight. The eBay that doesn't check listings. The eBay that takes no responsibility for what's sold here, apart from its own 30 day money back guarantee. The eBay that doesn't even claim that items sold here won't be untruthfully described, unsafe or even illegal. 

The mistake so many buyers make is to imagine that eBay is like buying from the shops - or even the web sites of known reputable businesses. The fact is that there are risks in both buying and selling on eBay of which I would guess that at least 90% of users barely understand. eBay is a jungle.