After an extended period of no announcements (the calm before the storm?) eBay UK and eBay IE have posted several new policy notices, including that all bladed products except cutlery are to be banned for sale on the site, further decreasing their market opportunities for sellers.

In a main Announcement Board (AB) post yesterday, the justification is that British laws and regulations, regarding which knives etc are legal for public sale, are becoming increasingly complex.  Without being involved in this market segment and having no specialist knowledge of it, I cannot comment whether that is the case, or whether the British team are simply taking the easy (lazy?) option to preventing legal entanglements.

I would have thought there would be a stipulation for sellers of knives to have some form of licensing within the UK, and therefore the addition of a database field to post the license number should have provided a workaround, but that’s only guesswork on my part.

The (as always) anonymous UK announcement (not signed off by an individual, but by “The eBay Team”) admits they have not yet thought through this implementation and policy change, stating,

“We will be updating this AB post shortly to ensure that any sellers of knives have full notice, details and timings for the changes.”

Looks like more tweaks and trimmings of listings for overworked eBay sellers.  The new policy will affect both domestic listings and international listings visible on eBay UK & IE.  This further trimming of choice on eBay comes at a time when there is chaos surrounding the (non)implementation of listings removal for being in contravention of the new Multiple Identical Listings policy that was due to begin on January 27th.

Discussions in the UK PowerSeller Forum reveal that neither the automated hiding of duplicated listings, nor the manual action in response to user reports, are removing the duplicates.  Sellers who made the effort to ensure policy compliance are rightly furious.

It feels like eBay are becoming an Internet Banana Republic – making policy announcements to appease public opinion, whilst being incapable of enforcing the increasing “legislative” burden due to an under-funded “police” force.

Are you affected by this policy?  Post a comment and let us know how it will affect your business.

Ed