Sadly the celebrity Fleece Dogs auctioned on behalf of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home haven’t reached great prices, mainly because no one could find them. Despite coverage on the BBC, the Sun newspaper and a mention on the Johnathan Ross show the auctions have fallen foul of eBays offensive items policy and don’t even show up in View Sellers Other Items.
Only Geri Halliwell’s Shih Tzu showed up in searches as the other auctions for the Blue Peter Dog, Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua, Jenny Frost’s Dachshund, Zara Philips’s Boxer, and the Queen’s Corgis were hidden due to an unfortunate spelling mistake – “Shit-Tzu”
eBay have an (unpublished) list of banned words and sadly these auctions for a great cause were hidden from public view. A salutory lesson for sellers to make sure offending words don’t appear in their auctions even by accident.
I wish I’d spotted this error in time for the seller to edit their auctions, but not to worry – for all you dog lovers out there you can donate direct to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home by clicking on the image below
5 Responses
Gotta love eBays’ offensive words policy. The affected listings are not actually removed from the site, just hidden, and still appear in the sellers’ ‘my eBay’ pages as normal. The sellers are not given any warning, either, so will not realise there is a problem unless they search for their own items on the site. Thus they could potentially generate extra fees for eBay by relisting items which will never sell.
I experienced this when eBay picked up on words included in their very own Item Specifics for a CD I listed. Somewhat naively in retrospect, I assumed that if it was in the item specifics, there can’t be a problem, as surely someone must check them?
Then there was the time I couldn’t post a response to a UPI dispute because eBays’ software recognised ‘who require’ as a term of abuse (look closely)…
Ornithology books with “tits” in them have been known to cause problems too (I kid you not!).
Oh dear, I am selling some 2nd cut engineering files at the moment – 2nd cut is one step finer than bastards…
Will they suffer the same fate?
I wondered why my listings for dried mealworms (as in food for wild birds and reptiles…) weren’t showing up. I aksed ebay and was told to give it time as listings may take a while to appear… After 3 days, they were still not searchable (so I turned to tamebay for help, and Biddy suggested that maybe my listing could contain a banned word- so my listing would not be searchable)
Yes, You’ve guessed it- in my listing I stated that the mealworms were an excellent source of protien for robins, tits and other birds…
Surely ebay should check the context in which these ‘banned’ words are being used?! The listings cost me a fortune (they were BIN’s at over 100.00 each), and three days were wasted!
As I said on the forum, Donna, you have to have a really dirty mind to work in eBay support 😀 They make “whorepresents.com”, “penisland.com” and “powergenitalia” look so innocent!