eBay Looking For Private Sellers For Paid Case Study & Media Exposure

[valueaddedresource]

In case you missed it, eBay is apparently looking to recruit private sellers in the UK for a paid case study and opportunity to share their selling journey through eBay’s marketing channels and media outlets.

Posted on the official eBay UK LinkedIn profile, which seems odd since LinkedIn, being a professional social networking site. would likely be a better place to reach business sellers, not private:

However, the link leads to a Google form where they make it clear that this is a paid opportunity and the offer is for private sellers only.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf9rFOSrsrnYJTDGA3qPvYBvwVQnRW-yKLPoQmi_-peAJccAA/viewform 

In addition to requesting name, city, and seller ID, sellers who wish to be considered are asked to answer questions like:

• How long have you been selling on eBay?
• What kinds of items do you typically sell on eBay?
• To your best estimate, how many items have you sold on eBay?
• How much have you earned on eBay? (Total or monthly average)
• What has been your biggest or most surprising sale?
• Are there any hobbies, activities or life milestones you've funded from money made on eBay?

I thought it was kind of strange that eBay didn't a post an announcement here in this community, but then thought about it some more and figured if the goal is to place "positive" private seller stories in already friendly media outlets...based on the many threads here about Simple Delivery, delayed payouts, buyer protection fees etc....maybe this isn't the crowd they are looking for and in fact maybe they're hoping to produce content for highly visible media placements specifically to counter the prevailing private seller feedback one might encounter in this forum.

And if that is the case, all the more reason why I thought it might be important to give regulars here a heads up and a chance to apply for this amazing opportunity. 😉

[pegr-834437]

Hopefully this year they have somebody on stage who tells us all how great eBay were when they were breaking UK law and eBay policy and the big punishment was zero fees for 3 months if they changed (I refuse to say upgraded) to a business account, but when that 3 months ended they opened a new private account and only list the trainers over £100 on the business account and anything else on the private account as trainers over £100 are 7.2% and under are 11.9%. Theres a good amount of them so wouldn't be hard to find either.

[guymafo]

Was it that the seller that had an active link to their website in the descriptions and in the about me spiel?

GM

[thesmokingrunner]

@guymafo  Yup - that's the one.

It's all still a bit odd - although the seller's account is still active, has live listings and is still selling, according to Companies House the company was dissolved on 03 December 2024.

So a business trading on a Private account which was forced to remove links to their own website and register as a Business - but  only after it won eBay's small business award - has now been dissolved, having never actually made a profit.

Unless you count the ten grand from eBay, that is...

[theelench]

Just goes to show how corrupt some .uk business sellers are.  How unconcerned ebay are about it, or perhaps they just don't bother to enforce their own policies and UK law if it doesn't suit them.

Would it surprise me if the winner was connected in some way to an ebay insider ?   Not at all.   All they need to do to deflect any blame is highjack another thread and whip up more mud slinging at private sellers.

[lucy_farmer]

I don't actually get this at all.....?

If a private seller were to get promotion on 'marketing channels' and 'online selling media outlets', how fast would they sell all their (obviously!) personal stuff and then have to stop...?

After that they'd have to be buying or making other stuff to sell and would therefore not be a private seller.

This promotion makes no logical sense at all.

Either ebay know they are condoning or encouraging sellers to break UK trading law, *or* ebay's marketing dept have no idea what they're talking about.

Dunno which of those options is the truth, but it's got to be one or the other....

[krafty-kreations]

Either ebay know they are condoning or encouraging sellers to break UK trading law, *or* ebay's marketing dept have no idea what they're talking about.

Dunno which of those options is the truth, but it's got to be one or the other....

I would say both!!

They know there are business sellers using private accounts to sell and whatever supposed action they take is useless so allow it to carry on and I am not sure they ever have an idea what they are talking about.

[akemp1]

---

@lucy_farmer wrote:

This promotion makes no logical sense at all.

---

The whole situation is a mess and ebay don't seem to have got their brains around the conflict between what they would like to see (lots of individuals sole trading on their platform) and how that is currently incompatible with consumer protection requirements.

As we have seen on this forum private sellers have a strong aversion to opening business accounts for their sole trading activity to be compliant. Even more confused by ebay telling private sellers they aren't paying fees when they are still only getting a proportion of what they buyer pays .  People here needlessly argue endlessly about it. 

The answer is simple - to have the same fees for everyone (a fair marketplace) and allow private sellers to have trading items on their same account with a compliant listing format. Just select if you are selling a personal or for-profit item when listing and it should display the extra information and force the required return policy etc. Reporting could also help people that do both to isolate their total trading related revenue for tax reporting purposes.

The type of account should identify the individual (a person or a company) and the type of listing should identify the type of sale (a personal item of an item being traded).

It's a fudge at the moment to restrict traded item listings to business accounts most people don't understand it because it doesn't make the most sense. If they are a sole trader they are the same person so should only need one account with one login, etc and it sholud enable them to do both types of activity in a complaint way.

[lucy_farmer]

'.....and allow private sellers to have trading items on their same account with a compliant listing format. Just select if you are selling a personal or for-profit item when listing and it should display the extra information and force the required return policy etc.'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I reckon ebay are hamstrung by a site that is 30 years old; and so is a lot of the code!

When ebay was set up, online selling was still the wild west which regulations hadn't caught up with. (and in ebay's mothership land, there *still* isn't much in the way of differences between private and business..)

If ebay tried to re-design listings in a manner more compatible to modern rules, U.K. legalities and common sense, they'd lose a ton of profits whilst the re-jig was happening!

(I have a suspicion a lot of stupid -for the UK site- ideas are pushed on to ebay UK without much in the way of realisation that America and UK are totally different countries. I have a horrible feeling that the USA sees us as just another, and subordinate,  state 😤)

[suelel1968]

Spot on @akemp1, but now you have said it, they can't do it for fear of you suing them for nicking your idea! Doh!

[valueaddedresource]

---

@lucy_farmer wrote:

I don't actually get this at all.....?

If a private seller were to get promotion on 'marketing channels' and 'online selling media outlets', how fast would they sell all their (obviously!) personal stuff and then have to stop...?

After that they'd have to be buying or making other stuff to sell and would therefore not be a private seller.

This promotion makes no logical sense at all.

Either ebay know they are condoning or encouraging sellers to break UK trading law, *or* ebay's marketing dept have no idea what they're talking about.

Dunno which of those options is the truth, but it's got to be one or the other....

---

@lucy_farmer  spot on but I can think of one other possibility, which is no less depressing - eBay sees private sellers as easily interchangeable avatars for their "brand" to be used for marketing campaigns and then discarded when no longer useful.

I think it's certainly possible and even likely they might end up "inadvertently" featuring "private" sellers who aren't really private sellers for all the reasons already mentioned here, but even if they do actually pick real private sellers, I don't think they would have a second of concern about what happens if the seller sells out of their personal stuff and has to stop.

While the comparison to the various awards and grants eBay doles out is not entirely off base, I think it's important to understand there may be some fundamental differences between eBay's intentions with those programs vs this one.

Yes, eBay usually puts out a press release for the awards and grants but they don't usually create entire external marketing campaigns around them - it's more geared toward convincing existing sellers to keep grinding away and you too could get $10K etc.

Given the questions on the application, I suspect the goal of this campaign is more for external marketing geared toward those who aren't already selling on eBay to say look, Mary here sold that handbag she had that was soooo last season and used the money she made to buy the hottest new trend - and so can you!

Or Bob had no idea how much this trading card his grandpa gave him when he was 10 was worth and now it just sold for thousands of pounds and isn't that just so exciting? What do you have in storage that you might be surprised at the value of too?

And if that's where they are going with this, then any given private seller is just a face and a "story" representing what eBay could be for anyone else "just like them" - and once that "story" has been recorded and the rights to use it signed over, it matters not to eBay whether that particular private seller gets more sales from the deal, sells out of their existing personal items and stops selling, or disappears into obscurity.

[the_book_seekers]

Either ebay know they are condoning or encouraging sellers to break UK trading law, *or* ebay's marketing dept have no idea what they're talking about.

It's not just UK laws it's also EU laws. Private sellers get to avoid the EU regulations which hamstring business sellers.

[thesmokingrunner]

---

@theelench wrote:

Just goes to show how corrupt some .uk business sellers are.  How unconcerned ebay are about it, or perhaps they just don't bother to enforce their own policies and UK law if it doesn't suit them.

Would it surprise me if the winner was connected in some way to an ebay insider ?   Not at all.   All they need to do to deflect any blame is highjack another thread and whip up more mud slinging at private sellers.

---

Oooo how cynical you are @theelench  ... : )

You're not the only one though - the possibility that it was all an 'inside job' crossed my mind at the time. The fact that a seller with a Private account was given a 'Small Business Award' was a bit of a red flag on its own, but to give the seller a prize of ten grand was just taking the mick from all the genuine and correctly registered small businesses who hadn't tried to play the system.

There are evidently no checks on that sort of account, just as there are evidently no due diligence checks carried out on Company Numbers used by business accounts on the site: although the seller mentioned in previous posts still has a (correctly registered) business account on eBay, the account still shows the Company Registration Number even though the Company was struck off over 9 months ago. As a result any potential buyers are being misled into thinking that they would be buying from an active Company, rather than a Company which no longer exists.

I'm sorry to say I believe very little of what I see on eBay these days and conduct my own due diligence before purchasing anything, though as I now shop around significantly more than I used to buying off eBay is becoming an increasingly rare event.

[akemp1]

---

@suelel1968 wrote:

Spot on @akemp1, but now you have said it, they can't do it for fear of you suing them for nicking your idea! Doh!

---

On this occasion, given the overwhelming public interest in ebay getting this right, I am happy to put in writing here that  I waive the license fees on my ideas above.

I still reserve the right to charge 1p/txn on my previous idea to have a policy not to implement bad ideas.

Given ebay already have a common platform for both private and business sellers I really don't think it would be that hard to allow sole trading private sellers to create for-profit listings that show with the business seller template with a mandatory returns policy. That plus the other enhancements mentioned above are completely do-able if they wanted to.

I propose a way forward for ebay that would set the highest standard in how to run a marketplace properly.

Then maybe so many people wouldn't be leaving in frustration to other places.

[department28]

'Given the questions on the application, I suspect the goal of this campaign is more for external marketing geared toward those who aren't already selling on eBay to say look, Mary here sold that handbag she had that was soooo last season and used the money she made to buy the hottest new trend - and so can you!'

Yes, I daresay eBay are hoping this will help to attract lots & lots of fresh, young, modern, enthusiastic, new 'simple' private sellers, to replace all the old, jaded, worn out, cynical, 'Simple Delivery is awful' brigade... we are also soooo last season... 😄

[valueaddedresource]

---

@department28 wrote:

'Given the questions on the application, I suspect the goal of this campaign is more for external marketing geared toward those who aren't already selling on eBay to say look, Mary here sold that handbag she had that was soooo last season and used the money she made to buy the hottest new trend - and so can you!'

Yes, I daresay eBay are hoping this will help to attract lots & lots of fresh, young, modern, enthusiastic, new 'simple' private sellers, to replace all the old, jaded, worn out, cynical, 'Simple Delivery is awful' brigade... we are also soooo last season... 😄

---

@department28  yep, hence why eBay didn't bother announcing this amazing new opportunity here in this community and also probably why my post in the weekly chat that might have caught more eyes was "accidentally" deleted. 😂

[lewisksince2007]

#NoToSimpleDelivery

[pegr-834437]

#NoToBusinessesOnPrivateAccounts