Has the visibility of your eBay listings reduced?

With the soaring popularity of online shopping, the number of malpractices has also been increasing. Online marketplaces have strict regulations and policies in place to weed out unethical sellers, despite which some sellers manage to continue with unethical practices. Etailers have tightened their noose around sellers with action to the effect of blacklisting taken immediately when someone is found violating the rules.

eBay takes stock

On the same lines, eBay has also put some strict policies in place to keep the malpractices in check.

Have the visibility of your listings on eBay reduced off late? Have you not been turning up under ‘Best Match’ in search results? It could be because you are violating the ‘Duplicate Listings Policy’!

Sellers violating the policy are creating an unpleasant experience for buyers as they would end up seeing the same items on their search results. Also it affects other sellers as the visibility of their items are reduced or their items wouldn’t show up easily due to the clutter created by duplicate listings.

eBay’s Duplicate Listings Policy

Sellers can’t have more than one fixed price listing of an identical item at the same time.

While making their purchase decision, customers would need to explore products and compare before zeroing in on their choice. So this policy ensures that customers don’t get to see the same product from the same seller in different listings.

Restrictions on the policy include listing an identical item:

• in different categories

• using different IDs

However, when it comes to listing on different eBay sites, the same item can be listed separately.

Consequences of violating Duplicate Listings Policy

Effective this June, listings of sellers who don’t adhere to the policy will have reduced visibility on Best Match search results. And this would be applicable across all the linked accounts until the duplicate listing is removed.

Also applicable would be the other actions effective for policy violation like limiting the buying and selling rights.

Take stock of your listings

Here is a quick recap of the policy:

• Fixed price– Avoid these:

• more than one fixed price listing of identical items at the same time.

• fixed price plus auction-style listing with But It Now option for identical item.

• Auction price

• Multiple listings allowed in the same account, but only one without bids will appear at a time.

• Multiple listings with and without Buy It Now option for the same item is not allowed.

• Multi-variation– Identical variation in different multi-variation listings is not allowed.

• Other eBay sites– It’s alright to create separate listings for the same item on different eBay sites but it should be done such that international shipping options don’t clutter the search results of any one site.

For more information and clarity on how each situation should be handled, visit eBay’s help page.