Revolting adverts showing at the top of eBay pages

[charmqueen]

Hello,

For months I have been tolerating a disgusting, graphic paid advert displayed at the top of eBay pages when I am running my ebay store. It was a close up of someone's ear with earwax being pulled out of it. Today it seems to have been replaced with a new one which is even more disgusting, showing the green contents from someone's throat!!! It literally makes me feel sick. I am attaching a photo of it.

Both ads are entirely irrelevant, I don't have ear or throat problems so they are obviously not linked to my search history (which is not trackable anyway).

As a long time seller on eBay and the fact that eBay make good money from me, I do not see why I should have to put up with any ads, let alone offensive ads like. You surely have some control over what ads are shown to your sellers!? Any ads are annoying when you're paying a company fees, but these are offensive and unacceptable. 

I look forward to hearing from you as a matter of urgency to fix this, I have been patient and tolerant with the revolting ear ad but this being even worse, enough is enough.

[danieh_6]

Time to try PiHole! thanks anyway 🙂

[tazzieterror]

I've been using PiHole for a few weeks now and am very happy with it.

[danieh_6]

I've been holding off for the longest time because you get product ideas from social media ads haha. But glad to know it works.

[padi*0409]

I might go and see my computer guru about that tomorrow tazzie, on reading up on it it seems there's a rasberry thingy I need to get first. Not sure if my non-geeky mind will get it but I'll give it a go I reckon and see what happens.

[tazzieterror]

The raspberry pi it runs off is a small (deck of cards/box of cigarettes sized - pick your poison) single board computer.

PiHole itself is pretty straight forward to install (lots of tutorials on the web), and once it's up and running it pretty much just sits in the background doing its thing.

I'm running mine using the same hardware as the one that recently sold on item #124209321870 - I see that seller has another similar one for sale, though I'm not sure I'd want to deal with them as they're too lazy to even put photos up for all their listings.

There's an even smaller version of the RPi - the Pi Zero W - which PiHole can also run on, and is cheaper again (~$30 new).

[padi*0409]

It's on my watchlist tazzie, so maybe I'll get one tomorrow after talking to my guru.  

[audio-spot]

I think the real question here is why eBay, which is in the business of selling (or at least fascilitating selling) feels the need to steer the customers away from their site? Imagine walking into Big W and one of their employees standing at the door handing out a Target specials catalouge!

There was a time a few years ago when there was a problem with the website and the ads were not loading. This made the whole site slow to the point of being unusable. The workaround for those without ad blockers was to use the eBay app. The problem lasted for several weeks.

[charmqueen]

Good point about steering people away.

The other thing is that presumably eBay are making money from displaying those ads? Normally with websites, if you pay a subscription, you have the benefit of not seeing ads. As sellers we're making eBay a lot of money so I think it's completely wrong that the pages should be cluttered with ads (particularly offensive ads!) as eBay is far from a free service for sellers. 

[performance_parts_clearance_centre]

AdBlock often doesn't auto-block some things, and they'll need to be manually added. Just click on the icon at the top right-hand corner of your browser, then select "Block element" from the drop-down menu, and hover over the ad, making sure that the entire ad is highlighted in yellow, then click on it. A pop-up will ask you if that's what you want to block, click "Add", and it should go away. 

You may have to repeat that if there's more than one element to the ad. Once you've blocked it, it should stay blocked.

But be aware, it doesn't work on "incognito" windows.