Selling duplicate items

[thereallygoodbookshop]

Is it allowable to sell identical items by duplicating the listing but just changing around the title a bit and having one of the items at a certain price with postage and then the other item at a higher price but with free postage?  The total prices of item + postage is almost identical within 30c or so.

I can see a seller doing this but I thought it was forbidden.

[twyngwyn]

http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/policies/listing-multi.html

[bullitprooftools2016]

If one is free post and the other post extra I can't see a problem.   Give it a go!

[dazzledayz]

It might be illegal but the UK and Chinese sellers have been doing this for ages and getting away with it.

(varying the title slightly by adding a numeric string etc)

It seems that the bots aren't that smart so can't spot the difference.

Whether or not eBay may start including product identifiers in the bot's algorithms is one potential issue.

If however, you choose a different item condition, you should be ok as this will always be picked up as dissimilar products.

[phorum_junkie*]

I can't understand why anyone would want to have duplicate listings, why waste one of your included listings when you can just list once with an availability of however many you have.

[twyngwyn]

I have duplicate listings because the 'quality' is different

[englishrosegardens]

I assume you mean you can see another seller that's doing it.  If you're asking are you allowed to do it, I've got one suggestion - treat others as you'd like to be treated.  Most sellers who do it are doing so for one reason only - to get an advantage over their competitors.  What they don't realise is that if we all did it we'd be no better off.  In fact, we'd all be worse off because buyers would be really turned off and wouldn't bother scrolling through two or three or even six times as many listings. 

In one of my categories there's a seller who has up to six of each item listed - all exactly the same but with slightly changed titles, and some have EXACTLY the same wording.  I've reported them but it's a waste of time.  They hardly sell any because they're incredibly boring and they don't have good feedback, but they're killing everyone else's sales as well by flooding the category (and ruining the buyer experience).  I think they've got 100 different items but they've got several hundred listings for them.

[thereallygoodbookshop]

Hello everyone, I suppose I should clarify.  I see a seller that is a competitor for some of the same titles I sell.  They are listing duplicate items which have almost identical total price when you add item plus postage or the other listing has a free post but higher item cost but they are the same products with maybe the title slightly changed.

I wanted clarification whether this was allowed because I thought it wasn't.

I don't want to add duplicate listings of my products because I know it is annoying and it just clogs up the listings but it does give them an unfair advantage I think.

They do it so much that I thought it must have been allowed.  I can see ebay's policy now that what they are doing is a duplicate listing violation but it doesn't specifically mention price manipulation and title changing there so maybe it is a grey area that no-one wants to touch.

I will just carry on as normal and hope that one day ebay finds them and ends their listings or something.  I don't want to overly dwell on it but is is annoying.

[stationmasterhobbies]

List multiple items as a BIN thats the best way.