eBay.com introduce product page report a seller

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eBay.com are calling on sellers to help clean up their product catalogue. It’s also an encouragement to report your competitor sellers if you don’t like their listings.

Put simply, eBay know that their product catalogue isn’t perfect. Products appear on eBay product pages that shouldn’t be there, often for a variety of reasons. It could be eBay matching keywords or in all likelihood it could be the seller has inadvertently (or purposefully) entered an incorrect GTIN (the number behind the bar code).

Regardless of the reason for the incorrect categorisation, eBay.com have told sellers “Effective immediately, if you see an item that doesn’t belong on an eBay product page, you can flag it to be reviewed and possibly removed“.

They went on to add “If you believe the item doesn’t belong on the page, click the flag symbol and “submit.” We’ll review and remove it, if necessary. Once removed, the item will still be available on the site for purchase, but will no longer be associated with this particular product. By letting us know about irrelevant items on our product pages, you’ll help buyers see the most relevant listings. Plus, you’ll improve the eBay experience for everyone in our community“.

What we don’t know is how the reviews will work – do eBay have enough staff to manually review each reported item or will it be an automated process. Will sellers gain a ‘Trusted reporter’ status which means when they click a button the item is taken off the product page immediately or will there need to be a number of reports before an item is actioned?

The general idea is idea is not to dob in competitors, it’s to tidy up product pages removing irrelevant items giving yours a better chance of gaining a sale.

13 Responses

  1. If it is an automated process (and even if it is manual) I suspect quite a few innocent sellers will have their businesses destroyed by mistakes on eBay’s part, and over-competitive sellers reporting all and sundry.

  2. This is a disaster.

    Automated removals will hit at lot of innocent businesses.

    Ebay’s record on fairness in this area sucks.

    Besides, most of these issues are caused by Ebay making inappropriate recommendations from search results, not the seller at all!

    Will you be seeing queues of people applying for new Ebay jobs to handle this properly?

    Not a chance.

    If anything, they’re going the other way – losing staff and downgrading customer services to countries who bid the lowest.

    The richer a company gets, the more staff they let go.

  3. Had my account put on 7 days suspension over weekend – trying to list in ethernet cables – provided an EAN that was correct but eBay catalouge decided it was a camera lense & put our listing in camera lense section instead. Listing stopped for miscategorization – automated system relisted – got stopped again – this repeated 8 times & account suspension applied.
    Did manage to get suspension reversed but took over an hour on the phone yesterday.
    Same thing happened a few weeks ago with diff item that eBay also had incorrect catalogue data for – listing stopped 3 times & each email sent to me suggested I list in a different category including one that was definitely not correct for the item.
    Does not give much confidence in the catalogue or the people who manage it who cannot even then provide correct category.

  4. Probably a waste of time, and of no real benefit to other sellers unless you have the time to go after your competitors. Sounds like opening the door to a bit of vigilantism.

    They don’t respond well to reports on duplicate listings, so how on earth will they accurately police this? There is 1 seller in my market who has huge numbers of duplicate listings, and has done so for years.Ii have reported him numerous times because he blocks up Search results, but Ebay have done absolutely nothing to deal with him.

  5. Regressive if you ask me, you will have people reporting things left right and centre, this is a step back to dark Donahue days. Clean up the catalogue by all means but the whole stick and carrot approach. 50% of ebay’s is totally useless for us, a lot of our products are PAL and everything comes up US in the UK, and descriptions are so wrong, you tube video totally wrong we just ignore eBay catalogue most the time and just start from scratch. Anything automated they will get wrong and always do. We so need a merchant friendly e-commerce marketplace in the UK these days.

  6. The eBay catalogue is a joke and 9 out of 10 times it is wrong in some way or another and eBay have the cheek to say the seller is responsible for the listing accuracy with eBay accepting no responsibility for their own catalogue errors when things go wrong in fact eBay is the joke

  7. A bit off topic

    My international sales are now showing in red under the orders

    International sale through Global Postage Programme

    This is in the awaiting dispatch section of seller manager when they are not Global shipping just regular international sales guess someone have been playing again

  8. In the areas I list there are numerous copyright/intellectual property infringements that I have reported and mentioned to customer service but they won’t do anything about them. I buy stock at auction and part of the terms and conditions are you are not allowed to use the brand name of the stores. Not only do some of the sellers use the brand name, they copy and paste the listing off the stores website and use the images as well. But ebay won’t do anything about it.

  9. I really don’t have faith in this. They can’t even get their existing review system right . I sell radio parts and my US listings are peppered with irrelevent reviews put there by eBay. For example a NEW replacement LCD display module has reviews including

    “Nice used microphone for a wonderful price!
    Not a bad deal here at all! This is about a third of the price of a brand new mic of the same kind, so definitely a bargain.”

    “This is the exact cable needed to align and tune as well as program”

    “Great product. Pricey, but if you’ve got the funds it is tops.
    The radio is simply the best two way handheld radio available today”

    “Awesome deal!!!
    Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-Owned”

    “Great Radio
    The APX radios are a must have!
    Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-Owned”

  10. Too time consuming for ebay to police it won’t work.

    Asking sellers to report other sellers listings is going to cause to much customer service headaches for ebay to handle. How will they control it?

    When you contact customer service they just give you a scripted answer. So getting a listing back online that has been removed because a competitor has reported is going to be a nightmare.

    Alot of innocent sellers can easily be hurt by something like this.

    Competitors will start to report all kinds of listings and ebay will be too slow to react.

  11. Duplicate listings exist now but if you report them they don’t get sorted, I assume because the customer service department is overwhelmed.

    So ebay’s idea is to introduce another system that requires even more time from there customer service department to deal with further enquires and complaints from new reported listings?

    Ebay management need to think better.

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