eBay have just banning users from swapping email addresses in messages as well as officially prohibiting users from making offers to buy or sell outside eBay and including links to non-eBay sites that don’t directly help buyers purchase items on eBay.
eBay add “Messages that include phone numbers and links to additional information that aid in the purchase decision or facilitate item delivery will still be permitted. These include warranties, manuals, and tracking links. We discourage buyers and sellers from sending offers to buy and sell outside eBay, as these transactions aren’t covered by eBay buyer protection programmes”.
In truth the only one that’s a bit of a pain is the email address one, I’ve made a lot of good friends on eBay and often prefer to communicate with them outside of eBay. It’s not really a problem for business sellers though – if you want to make it easy for buyers (and other sellers) in the UK to contact you then simply include your email address and telephone number in your Business Seller Information and eBay will kindly insert them into every single one of your listings for you.
9 Responses
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_at_ [_at_= @] works fine
Last week great example.
Lady required quite a lot of technical info so I tried to attach a PDF, moments later a warning from eBay arrived, they couldn’t send my email blah blah for my own safety or some such drivel.
I messaged her explaining I would need her email address but not to put the @ in the address, I also gave her mine without the @……
3 hours later she asks why I haven’t sent the email *HEAD DESK*
Anyway, she ordered over the phone which saved us £66.66 in fees so it worked out in the end but FFS eBay, stop treating us all as idiots / con artists.
Please educate and enforce this with the buyers then! (angry)
Why should my ebay message stats suffer as a result of banned messages that I constantly receive daily from buyers with requests that ebay won’t let me reply to. If I don’t answer then how does it look?
Easy answer to this, direct them to your ‘business contact’ page, where you are OBLIGED to display your contact information.
There’s nothing in the rules that say you can’t direct them to a page within your own eBay store 😉
https://stores.ebay.co.uk/deutscheparts/Business-Contact-details.html
Simples…..
Could someone tell me how can a buyer contact you without opening a case!.
Thanks!
The direct communication ban is so short sighted. Mostly, I want to alert an active bidder to a related item not yet listed. If only eBay had a sensible “add-on” procedure (say at a reduced flat rate) they could share in the frequent success of this (ie by getting the whole payment via PayPal).
Instead, I have to be underhand by sending a disguised address – then to avoid any questions, often getting the whole of the payment by cheque. Who’s the loser?
By the way, to get full business details on every listing you do need to adjust your account settings.
peter210