NEW !!! Listings from any one seller will be limited to 10 per page

[lina-mallows]

Did anyone catch this in the recent MAY 19th announcement?

According to MIRIAM who directed us here:
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/ca/200805191654102.html

PREFACE:
"Starting early June, the Multiple Listings Limit Policy, which limits sellers to 15 identical listings at any one time, will be removed. Soon sellers will be allowed an unlimited number of identical listings. "

HOWEVER........

"To prevent buyers from being overwhelmed by identical listings, advancements in Finding will limit the display of duplicates from the same seller. The listing displayed will be determined by the sort option that the buyer chooses, such as Time Ending Soonest, Newly Listed, Total Cost, and Best Match.

Also, the number of listings from any one seller will be limited to 10 per page, unless the only available listings that remain are from the same seller. This change ensures buyers have a variety of sellers to choose from"


So SELLERS- list as many MULTIPLE LISTINGS as you want.
Pay all the eBay fees you want.
And eBay will NOW RESTRICT the viewing of these MULTIPLE LISTINGS!

What if you were AUCTIONING off MANY- SIMILAR/IDENTICAL items-
would not this LIMITING of exposure possibly affect the closing price?

How can this NEW situation possibly be justifiable?

At this point- What seller would waste there time, money, and effort to list more than ONE IDENTICAL item?

[futuretech_liquidations]

eBaY is dangerously crossing the line from being a facilitotor to now taking more and more control over what is sold and whom gets the sale.

Their greediness will result in their downfall as they will no longer be able to claim that they are merely a facilitor.

They are now positioning themselves for a major class action lawsuit for unethical business practices, price fixing and discrimination.

The geniuses will soon get a nice surprise when the justice department investigates their books to see that they have been knowingly lying about their revenue and user base for years and milking the stock market for years.

TIM @ FTL

[recped]

How can this NEW situation possibly be justifiable?

Quite easily actually. eBay removed the limit on the number of identical listings from an single seller, in order to avoid lowlife sellers from placing hundreds of listings and dominating the search results they have limited to 10 the number of listings from a single seller that will show on each search results page .

Seems like a very reasonable compromise to me.

[recped]

The geniuses will soon get a nice surprise when the justice department investigates their books to see that they have been knowingly lying about their revenue and user base for years and milking the stock market for years.

That's a pretty severe accusations you are throwing out, do you actually have ANY evidence eBay have violated the Sarbanes-Oxley Act?

[whoscloset]

Have to agree with recped on this one. Just how many of your listings do you feel should dominate page 1 of search at any given time?

[lina-mallows]

"the number of listings from any one seller will be limited to 10 per page"

What exactly this means is not clear.
"LIMITED TO"- does not preclude the appearance of less than 10 items.

If I am not mistaken- eBay still permits buyers (under CUSTOMIZE DISPLAY) to adjust the number of items displayed when conducting a search.
The options at present are 25, 50, 100, and 200.

The "LIMIT" does not appear to have any correlative to the number of items the buyer requests to be displayed when searching.

I believe that futuretech_liquidations is correct that a line is being crossed. What line- and what laws- that's for the Justice people to determine. HOWEVER- there definitely appears to be a case that eBay is manipulating the market in a manner that is prejudicial to some sellers, while being beneficial to others (some sellers- and presumably themselves).

eBay is no longer a NEUTRAL provider of services.
When the listings were provided as they were listed- a level playing was created.

There was a time (pre-MULRONEY) when the Competitions Act made it unlawful for a supplier (read as eBay) to charge a differentiated price for the same product or service, within a given market. Conversely- paying the same price, one was to receive the same service.
Regardless of the demise of this concept of market fairness, this certainly now is not the case with any given listing on eBay. Far too many criteria determine, where, how, when, and even NOW IF a listing will appear.
Methinks something is very wrong here.

[dipmicro]

I have pointed the anti-trust legislation violation when eBay restricted the maximum price of store items to $1. The person from government agency agreed it was likely a violation, but refused to press charges, apparently too insignificant for them to care. Recommended class action.

Btw. justice department is too busy with collecting speeding violations fines and does not have time to investigate eBay peddling 😉

[lina-mallows]

dipmicro-- Has eBay suddenly become the elephant in the room?

[futuretech_liquidations]

The evidence you are asking for recped is already public knowledge.

Plenty of sites on the internet you can look and see for yourself.

It has long been disputed that the actual user base of ebay is nowhere close to what they claim it is - given that they are counting multiple id's as unique id's when in fact they belong to the same person.

Secondly, it has also been public knowledge that ebay has been padding the listing with fake and bogus auctions at times to bring their numbers up. There is plenty of news and articles on this one alone...remember the 500,000 shoppers.com listing that magically appeared on ebay?

[recped]

The evidence you are asking for recped is already public knowledge.

Plenty of sites on the internet you can look and see for yourself.

It's not evidence of anything it's simply hearsay.

To examine one of your claims. the shopping.com listing which did appear on the site for a few days would have absolutely zippo effect on eBay's annual report of listing numbers.

Regarding your claim of inflated member numbers, eBay are very careful to describe their number of active members, along with the raw number they provide the specification of what they call "active".

If they were actually committing fraud on the scale you suggest they would be joining the executives of Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems and WorldCom behind bars. Other than allegations from disgruntled sellers I haven't seen anything in the legitimate media suggesting they are guilty of any similar activities.

[lina-mallows]

recped- "If they were actually committing fraud on the scale you suggest they would be joining the executives of Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems and WorldCom behind bars."

Interesting comment- Only time will tell......... PLEASE- when someone is poking around in this DISCUSSION BOARD'S ARCHIVE years from know- PLEASE LET US KNOW the outcome!

ONE CAVEAT for 2008- for anyone attending eBay LIVE in Chicago-
Don't drink the grape flavoured Kool-Aid !!!

(I know it should be correctly referred to as Flavor Aid- but the reference is likely obscure enough to not be compounded by further frivolity.)

[dipmicro]

dipmicro-- Has eBay suddenly become the elephant in the room?

Lina, perhaps is the language barrier or my insufficent mental capacity, but I do not get the metaphor.

[cumos55]

Elephant.. big ... cannot be moved easily.. takes up the whole room.. and ... ??Stubborn??

[lina-mallows]

The elephant is something that is ever present, and NO ONE wants to mention. IT IS TOO BIG to ignore- yet for whatever reason, no one can say anything.


Without being too politically incorrect- it is exactly that political correctness that the ELEPHANT anology may refer to.
Spending much time in the United States- there are areas that we frequent, where we are the only "WHITE PEOPLE" in a room of dozens, if not hundreds of differently coloured people. So- at that moment WE ARE the elephants in the room. MOST- if not all, would never dare ask WHY ARE WE THERE. Though as recently as last week, my Brother was told, that he should move his car BEFORE NIGHTTIME, as it wouldn't exactly be in his best interest to be there after dark. (Parked about FIVE blocks from YANKEE Stadium in New York.)

A person in a wheelchair may feel the same way. The CHAIR is so obvious, but many, will never dare mention it, or ask anything related to that chair.


In the ENRON situation, NO ONE (financial analyst) dared ask the probing question just exactly HOW ENRON was making all that money.
Everyone was far too happy making obscene profits.
And- when anyone was daring enough to get close to asking just exactly what the advanced booking of expected profits was doing to the bottom line- they were dismissed as not knowledgeable of the BRAVE NEW ECONOMY!

ENRON'S PROFITS did not appear from nowhere- and in the end, the everything collapsed, as the majority of profits were BOGUS.

------------------------------------
According to WIKIPEDIA:
"Elephant in the room"
"The elephant in the room (also elephant in the living room, elephant in the corner, elephant on the dinner table, elephant in the kitchen, and horse in the corner) is an English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. It is based on the idea that an elephant in a small room would be impossible to overlook.
It is sometimes used to refer to a question or problem that is obvious, but which is ignored out of embarrassment or taboo. The idiom also implies a value judgment that the issue ought to be discussed openly.
The term is often used to describe an issue that involves a social taboo, such as racism or religion, which everyone understands to be an issue but which no one is willing to admit."

[dipmicro]

an English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed

Oh, excellent, now I get it 🙂 Thanks for a nice idiom, I like it.

Yup, fits the eBay 🙂