How is it possible that sellers are able to incorporate theit websites and email contacts

[m3399]

How is it possible that some sellers are able to incorporate their website (outside eBay) and email contacts,while buyers and sellers are not allowed to exchange email addresses?

[reallynicestamps]

Possibly no one has reported them yet?

Or the addresses may have been inserted not as links but as pictures, which would not be picked up by eBay's robots.

There are also a few oldtimers who are grandfathered, and some of the mega-sellers may have different contracts than you or I.

[momcqueen]

Those sellers would either be skating around the actual rules or ignoring them altogether. 

Can you provide a more specific example of what you speak without identifying the seller(s)?

[m3399]

There is a seller who sells reading glasses.I bought a pair on eBay and after a while she no longer listed them on Ebay but she mentioned to have her own website.It did not take a scientist(I am not 🙂 ) to figure it out.

I  contacted her via the email address on her webpage and she offered to sell me the very same glasses at a price 4 times higher that the one I bought from her on Ebay.

In her Ebay listings she complaints about all the issues Ebay is giving to sellers and she mentiones her website and provides her email address used as contact from her website.Just by this address,the webpage is obvious.

There are many like this on Ebay,especially from the UK.

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@mjwl2006 wrote:

Those sellers would either be skating around the actual rules or ignoring them altogether. 

Can you provide a more specific example of what you speak without identifying the seller(s)?

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[momcqueen]

That sounds like a blatant violation of policy.

No one forces a seller to sell here. If we agree to sell, we do so by the rules of the site. Whether we like it or not.

If this happened to me as a buyer, I'd report the seller. And, on principle, avoid the person and their wares. It's unethicalto do what they're doing, and to me that speaks loudly about the person I'd be conducting business with.

Like I said, most sellers have issues from time to time. We work within the rules or lobby to change them. Not bypass them.

[momcqueen]

But the issue with UK business sellers is different. They are required by uk law to publish all their details.

[i.am.vivian]

True, their business address if they are one, but even they can't offer links to their own websites either, not if its a buy & sell place.  

I looked up the UK policy, and like mjwl says, it's a big policy violation:

We don't allow links to non-eBay sites where other items are offered for sale.

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/listing-links.html

Near as I can tell, using eBay as a way to direct buyers to a person's own website is not allowed in any way at all anywhere ever.  They're not messing around.   🙂  

There is a q&a about it too:

http://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Archive-Business-Seller-Board/links-to-website-in-description/m-p/422...

We don't allow our members to use eBay to contact each other to make offers to buy or sell items outside of eBay. Also, members can't use information obtained from eBay to contact each other about buying or selling outside of eBay.

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/rfe-spam-non-ebay-sale.html

So to the OP, if you want to report something, 

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/buy/report-trading.html