eBay petitions against manufacturers
eBay has launched an online petition to protest against manufacturers, which are trying to block the sale of their branded goods.
eBay has launched a petition campaigning against manufacturers and brand owners, which are threatening to block the sale of their branded goods on its site.
The online trading site has stated that some brand owners and manufacturers have cited the issue of counterfeit selling on the eBay site as their reason for attempting to prevent the sale of their goods. However, eBay statistics show that only 0.15% of listings last year were potentially counterfeit.
eBay is campaigning for the EU competition law to be amended to “stop these unfair trade practices.”
In a statement, eBay said: “Ultimately, what is at stake is the right of sellers to compete fairly in the wider online marketplace, and the right of buyers to be able to access the best possible deals from the widest possible selection of goods.
“The real aim of these brands is to block the sale of all their products on our site – regardless of whether such items are new or second-hand, genuine or fake. It’s not just luxury items that are affected, but also everyday items like children’s toys, electronic equipment, lawnmowers and pushchairs.”
In its online guidelines, eBay clearly states that sellers must not list branded goods that have not been endorsed by that company, and any breach could result in account suspension, a cancelled listing or limits on account privileges.
eBay has emailed its account holders to inform them of its petition campaign. To add your vote to the site’s petition, click here to sign in to your eBay account or to create one.
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Ebay would have many ebay sellers supporting this endeavour had they not chosen to treat all sellers as dishonest criminals.
Ebay shows in their policies and treatment of ebay sellers that they believe sellers need to be scored, graded and monitored by an unfair, opinion based rating system; that ebay sellers need to be censored, punished, restricted and suspended at any time with no appeal for “violating” whatever interpretation of ebay’s policy ebay’s execs choose this week.
Ebay has made many seller enemies at a time when ebay needs many seller friends.
July 7th, 2009 at 1:51 amThere is an unstoppable move towards Internet selling. Any manufacturer who attempts to block this will be marginalised. It is not obvious how they can do this anyway, especially with second hand goods.
Ebay simply provides a platform to bring buyers and sellers together. They are not the seller and so the fine for “selling” fake goods is fundamentally wrong. It is the seller who is culpable and buyer beware.
Too much legislation. Governments must not distort the free economy by artificial protectionist aid to the big brands.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:14 amAnd will these companies also be taking a trip down to car boot sales and markets and closing these down for selling goods with their brand name on? Which companies are planning on taking on eBay?
Let eBay name and shame them, then we can tell them where to go with their products.
The only problem is eBay has made a lot of enemies in the past with it’s sellers, I would love to see the eBay/PayPal monopoly fall, but not if it meant other sites would also suffer the same way, so I’ve signed it just in support of the other sites like eBid and for the freedom to sell my items on when I’ve finished with them.
Obviously the manufacturers who are trying to ban the sale of second hand items don’t care about environmental issues, they’d rather see their products go on the landfill after people are bored with them, instead of being passed on to someone else, in case people might counterfeit their products.
Their products are going to be counterfeited anyway no matter whether or not they shut down eBay and people will still buy them, actually shutting down eBay may even make it harder for them to control. Just look at Napster, the record companies shut down Napster, suddenly thousands of new “clones” of Napster appeared on the scene, many of them based in countries that didn’t support American copyright laws, and many of the new file sharing programs even allowed sharing of videos, something with Napster didn’t, thus also killing the movie industry as well as the music industry, instead they could have had all their eggs in one basket and kept control of it.
July 7th, 2009 at 6:41 pm