eBay Deletes Seller Listings in Brash Move
eBay is supposed to be a venue only, bringing buyers and sellers together. But eBay has increasingly gotten hands-on and now it can delete sellers' listings at will (and as we've previously reported, can even relist a seller's inactive listings).
A reader forwarded a copy of a letter they received from eBay.....
I was very rude on the dotCOM boards when the new layout (with Participation Badges!! Woo-hoo!!) came in.
The twirp who designed it mentioned that he had been with eBay for less than three months.
I was sarcastic.
And got pink-slapped.
Well , whoodeefriggindoo.
Any company that turns such an important part of their social media outreach over to someone who has not yet had his first performance review.....
I'm ..... trying not to be sarcastic again.
I mean, I have all those Participation Badges to protect.
On a slightly more serious note.
EBay does add a note to older listings at the 16 month mark. I do find that useful.
Some I have deleted and donated.
Some I have updated-- occasionally raising prices.
Some I have left alone.
Some I have taken down for a month and then relisted unchanged.
Because we closed down for a couple of months in 2014 while moving west, I don't have many listings older than that. But I sold a book last month that I had in stock since 2005, going by the inventory slip inside the cover.
@femmefan1946 wrote:
On a slightly more serious note.
EBay does add a note to older listings at the 16 month mark. I do find that useful.
You've touched on the important bit here. Namely there are more productive ways for ebay to provide sellers with tools to deal with aging inventory versus deleting your listings then rubbing in your face by saying oh hey sorry not crediting any fees.
A more productive way to deal with the problem (for both parties) would be to create seller tools that actually make use of the data ebay already has. They already have the number of days an item has been listed, item specifics to link and compare to same item sales by other sellers, traffic stats, etc. Turn that into a dead stock report with quick and easy tools like setting a promo price or free shipping without having to go through painfully slow revise/edit work flow on a sku by sku basis. If I'm a seller with thousands of listings, these things occur because of a manageability issue. These are things that I directly implemented with ecommerce retailers in the past and I can tell you it yields much better results than running around trying to enforce new policies that antagonize.
You can work on front end and policies as much as you like but improving back end seller tools will yield better results.
I don't know whether the eBay rep really answered your question (re listings being arbitrarily ended) today. He seemed to say two different things, both of which were rather ambiguous at best. His last comment was:
In the interim, since the 'stale listings' process was a one-time thing (as I understand it), your listings should not be at risk.
Whatever that means. What "one-time thing"? I thought this was happening currently, at least according to your question.
Earlier (Post #25) he had said: " the concerns have already been passed up to Senior Management at eBay and actions are underway to determine what the plan is for communication / policy on this kind of a change in the future."
Huh???? 
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