When eBay jacked their prices (again), I closed my store and started my own site (www.rancoredelf.com). I moved more and more stuff over to my site as eBay has gotten worse. I just keep stuff that sells really easily on eBay, and that's keeping me barely at Bronze PowerSeller.
Today I got a notice that said they closed about a dozen of my auctions for violation of containing the following information:
http://www.rancoredelf.com/http://www.rancoredelf.com/http://www.rancoredelf.com/http://www.rancoredelf.com/http://www.rancoredelf.com/
http://www.rancoredelf.com/http://www.rancoredelf.com/http://www.rancoredelf.com/http://www.rancoredelf.com/http://www.rancoredelf.com/
My auction didn't contain any of that "information". My auctions do have a little button that says "rancoredelf.com" (without the www.) but the button links to my "about me" page on eBay. Nowhere in my auctions does anything say what they said it does. Here's an existing auction to prove that:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=5211398227&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT
(excuse the strange fonts and text sizes... eBay keeps messing that up randomly)
See? No link, and no text that has my website's URL. It's perfectly legal to have an image, as long as it's a certain size, which mine is, and as long as the image doesnt contain link to your own website.
Here's the appropriate section of eBay rules. Only certain links are allowed in an auction, among them is "Links to your About Me page (in addition to the About Me icon already provided by eBay)". The rules for images say they have to be a certain size, but they can say anything you want them to, including the name of a your business. I've been over the rules a dozen times and made sure I complied with every one. And for some reason, they feel my auction contains a link to my site - it does not.
This is the fifth time this has happened, and I believe someone is reporting my auctions (probably a competitor). I've seen sellers who say stuff like "Thanks for viewing this auction, which is brought to you by www.magiccardsforsale.com!" They've been on eBay for years and they don't seem to have a problem! It's all over the place, even with the big sellers. And somehow, my icon is a threat? eBay obviously can't handle the idea of people selling on other sites.
I'm probably about a year late in leaving, but this is my "so long". I'll probably keep my account open to buy stuff, and sell the odd (a few per month) item so I can maintain my PayPal preferred MasterCard (I think you need to keep selling in order to get the 1.5% cash back). Other than that, everything is at my store now.
I pay $20 a month for unlimited use of my own site, including technical support that actually DOES SOMETHING other than cancel my listings. I can "list" 500,000,000 items or more, "Feature" any of them I want, have links and images galore, and it's all still $20. Advertisers have contacted me about paying for ad space on my site, which I'm considering. Business is about half what I was doing on eBay, and instead of $500 in fees per month, I'm paying $20. At this point, eBay is basically pushing me away, and I'm going to listen this time.
Thanks for the fun! I probably won't be in this forum much longer, but I did manage to learn a few things and get help with a couple problems. This forum was basically the only reason to be a PowerSeller anyway. Good luck to anyone who is staying.
Daron
