eBay sent me a “Sounds too good but it’s true… See what’s selling in your hometown email”, so naturally I did what I was supposed to do and clicked the links.
I have a nephew and the second item on the email, a Hasbro Speak out board game, looked interesting, but then I read the eBay reviews and the alarm bells started sounding.
Perhaps the title should have been enough to warn me off, it says “Genuine Hasbro Brand New Speak Out Board Game” – any time someone needs to say their product is ‘Geniune’ and the klaxons go off. But let’s have a look at the reviews:
Three out of seven reviews say that the product is a fake and all the verified reviews are citing the same product but from a different eBay seller.
Reviews say the product is a fake when purchased from a different seller and this seller feels the need to stipulate that the product is genuine but his negative feedback for the item suggests his stock are also fakes.
We know that eBay’s automated emails are automated… I’m pretty sure a human doesn’t look at the emails and it’s an algorithm that selects the products for sale. It’s unfortunate that they’ve selected a product from a Chinese seller that looks like a fake.
Just to add salt to the wound, the subtitle reads “UK SELL”… I couldn’t possibly comment, but you might well think that this is another deliberate attempt to be misleading.
2 Responses
Ebay are an embarrassment.
This item says it is located in London UK and using ‘postage Services from outside UK’. How can it be in London then?
It shouldn’t be possible to select these options as a seller but Ebay don’t give a damn as long as they are raking in fees. They should be held to account for promoting illegal selling practices and fined billions then they might step up and police their own site.
The only thing ebay is speaking out about is ‘Brands’ who are preventing selling on their marketplace because that costs them money.
I really hope more and more Brands start preventing sales of their products on Ebay and Amazon. They represent everything that is bad in the world namely greed, greed and greed.
As a top rated seller with 100% positive feedback you might expect me to be an enthusiast about eBay but no.
We are cutting back on our listings on eBay as prices spiral down due to VAT fraud and the promotion of dodgy products. To compound this eBay and Papal conspire to take a bigger cut while increasingly we are being asked by customers ‘ is it genuine? ‘ Ebay has made feedback useless because it does not allow complaints about quality and authenticity to be valued by its system.
Trading with authority and trust is a keystone to retail business that we have respected since 1982 and is something that ebay has yet to learn the value of.
Mike