Sellers linking to Ebay auctions need to be removed from site

[Juliebabe25]

Every week I will spend about 15 minutes - going through certain categories, looking for links. I would recommend everyone does that, its an impossible job for the eBid team, links, telephone numbers, contact details, web address in the picture etc.. (although I agree that something could easily be done about importing listings with links).

So what do you do when you find some links ?
Do you report the auction to ebid using the option supplied ?
If so, in your experience do ebid act on this ?

(as you say sellers should be more respsonsible, and intelligent)

[deanosaur1972]

So what do you do when you find some links ?
Do you report the auction to ebid using the option supplied ?
If so, in your experience do ebid act on this ?

(as you say sellers should be more respsonsible, and intelligent)

Yes I do report (a lot)

The eBid team do act - sometimes like lightening - sometimes they will need an additional reminder or two, I bookmark the sellers in question to ensure that action is taken and then keep them bookmarked for a while because those sellers will often do the same thing again a few weeks later.

When I get some free time I also go through the Federal Drug Administration banned list of products and also the UK equivalent to get all the 'life threatening' or dangerous products removed (its usually the unlicensed herbal stuff) - partly personal reasons for that one because I have seen the damage that they can do, I haven't done that for a while so no doubt there will be loads listed - as there will be on any auction site.

[sidthelamp]

Has anybody thought of doing this the nice way. Contact the seller and ask them to remove the eBay references. I think that would be a lot better PR than just mass reporting/deleting a bunch of listings.

tried that does not work in my experience i just report them now, every min a link to feebay and other e-commerce web sites is live its taking business away from here, which is bad for all of us

[penny291]

does it work the other way round? if i put an auction on feebay and my ebid store link in, or my ebid store link on my fbay all about, just asking, lol

[PetBazaar]

Thing is, it's not that straight forward. Most links do not include that text in the description field that is visible to us. Links would be in the HTML and do not always point to that address anyway. There are other URLs that point to different servers. Even if that exact text were included it would be difficult to automatically check whether the seller is referring to their history on that site rather than suggesting people visit it.

The only solution I can see is to stop every single reference to Feebay; as posted above.

But it is that straightforward. A software based approach doesn't care what the user sees, all it is interested in is looking for references in the underlying HTML. I only used the .co example as an, um, example. My guess is that that exact combination of characters would almost certainly be a web link - or a chronically bad speller and punctuator. There could and should be a list of banned phrases that would result in some sort of action (to be decided by eBid) being taken and this would catch the other URLs.