Hi,
I have been in some thought after seeing many posts about locked phones, stolen phones, and phones under contract considering eBay's non-protection toward bad transfers of contracts/etc
It is my belief that phones bound to a a provider or under contract should be banned from sale on eBay as a contract or service is not a tangible item as according to their approach to software licensing and the contracts therein and thus cannot be transferred via an eBay transaction. Selling a phone based on a brand name (AT&T, Verizon, Bell Mobility, Telus, etc) is indeed an influence on most phone purchases and thus to remove the possibility of that impact, those names should not be included on listings.
If someone wants to sell a used phone on eBay, it should be required that the phone be factory reset, unlocked, without contract, without a connected provider and listings should not contain service provider names. Only the hardware should be sellable. With this in mind, SIMs should not be permitted to be sold on eBay — even if included on phones as well as they are tied to a service and services are not allowed to be sold as they are not tangible.
This would also help eliminate low-hanging fruit of stolen phones as it'd require more effort than steal phone, wipe it and list it which would set the bar higher than the common criminal.
If eBay wants to indicate that transfers of software licenses may not be "insured" under the buyer protection, so should cell service/contracts/SIMs and thus should be unbound from the phones. The buyer can go to their local provider storefront and obtain a SIM and a contract of their own.
ALTERNATELY, if it's a flipphone without a SIM slot and all phones of that model are bound to a provider, the listing should indicate that the listing isn't protected under buyer protection as to warn buyers that the purchase is caveat emptor and that eBay can't help them get the phone unlocked nor re-assigned nor a refund for issues with the provider accepting the phone.
In summary: If eBay cannot provide protection and doesn't actually prohibit the listing of such, the listing should have to state expressly in bold print "This purchase may not be protected by eBay buyer protection because it contains X". This can potentially apply to used computers with pre-installed software mentioned as well.
