Hi everyone
I hope somebody can clear things up for me .
Registered a month ago' and on of the first purchase was a buyitnow item from my boyfriend.
At that time i was in the process of moving with him so i registered
with the new address so some items bought from china would not risk to be delivered to my old address .
My bf assists me with most of the ebay things and we often use the same computer.
Yesterday we got restrictions on our accounts for shill bidding and we called up customer suppost higlithing that i did a buyitnow not a Bidding therefore we wanted to know where is the problem.
The operator told us about " what is shill bidding" and told us that no family memeber, no room-mate, no people sharing the same computer and not even friends from any corner of the world can bid or buy from us. This is part considered shill bidding.
We apologised for the genuine error( even thouhg we really did not agree that buyitnow compromises fair trading on ebay) and asked if the restriction can be removed.
The operator suggested us to replaynto the ebay email explainig thenreasons why we did not believe we breached the policy and see if they can review and remove the restriction.
The replay from rbay was pretty much a copy&paste of the "what is shill bidding" and not a single consideration of our personal explanaion therefore the restriction remained applied.
Fair enough, we accepted the outcome and went through the tutorial we were prompted.
Ironically my bf got the only wrong answer based on what ebay and cs directions . In fact question n7 was pretty much the scenario case that applies to our case. A woman who want an item from her sister listing. My bf ticked the anwer " there is no way she can get the item without violating ebay policy" and he was wrong!
Hahaha i am still laughing at him. I did my tutorial after him so i got them all correct.
Called cs again and asked what/who is right or wrong as that question conflicts with ebay policy and also has a side explanation why the answer was incorrect an clearly specifies that buy it now is allowed wit family,friends,room mate and people sharing the same computer.
The cs operator repeated several tiems the same monologue " what is a shill bidding" but could not provide an answer about the tutorial conflicting with that.
All we wanted to know is where is the bug? The tutorial is basically based on ebay policy and if there is a conflict we want to know what is the right thing to do
At he end the cs operator was clearly embarassed and all he could do he promised to take this issue up to the next meeting with his superiors.
Then we asked to kindly update us with the outcome because we are sort of "on pause" .
He replied that he cannot disclose with us the outcome of this issue(?? ) and the restriction cannot be removed for the next 14 days because it is system generated.
Basically we have auctions ended and fees not refunded, restrictions on both accounts and a financial loss for something ebay is not sure about and we will never know why because they cannot disclose it to us?
And what about friends nor allowed to buy from us?
We just won a tv on auction and we contacted the seller who seemed to be a very nice person. We will collect the tv over a coffee but after that we cannot buy anymore from him because we could potentially become friends!?
Hope somebody who has had the same experience can give us some advice because more than everything else it counts the fact that we don't know how to deal in the future an although the simpliest solution seems to by" dont sell to people you know" we believe it is an ufair limit to our selling activities
Thank you
Barbara
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