Friday 19 January 2007

EU know it's a load of cobblers

So far, these efforts appear to be paying off with minimal disruption to our legitimate sellers.

That's Bill Cobb referring to the effects of the new "Building Trust by Reducing Counterfeits" policy. Exactly which sellers is Cobb talking about here? The couple of hundred cherry-picked and invited to listen to his spiel in San Jose? Or the thousands of sellers around the world outside the Ivory Towers who are struggling to maintain their sales on eBay?

We reported last week the huge problems Spanish sellers are having now that they're unable to list or ship outside Spain. The European Union is working to remove all cross border trade restrictions.

Removing border posts across Europe is easy. The real challenge for the European Union is to ensure that more subtle obstacles to cross-border trade in goods and services are similarly consigned to history.

Suddenly removing the ability for Spanish sellers to sell luxury goods across Europe is taking European Internet commerce back years at a single stroke, and it's not just the Spanish! All the other EU sites are in the same position, it's just I don't speak good enough Italian to communicate with those guys and report on the situation there!

There's another serious consequence of the new policy too, sellers who have been regularly selling on eBay for a number of years are suddenly finding their ability to make a living is severely restricted. A quick browse of almost any community board reveals sellers fighting to be able to list the inventory they have for sale.

It took them 10 days, to reinstate mine.... Their reply was that my account was in good standing and it was just a spot check!!!! bloody cheek. i was reinstated for a day then it happened again. was off for 5 days then back on again.. same answers..... then restricted me again while they looked into it. another 5 days..all in december too!!! i lost thousands as a power seller.

This quote is not an isolated incident, and we're not talking about sellers that have only just started out on eBay. These are sellers who have been trading for years and in many cases rely on eBay for their entire income.

It's all very well for Bill Cobb whose remit is eBay North America to state that sellers aren't being disrupted, but maybe if he cast his eye across the water to Europe he'd find a very different story. It is not the biggest sellers on the North American continent who are suffering, it's the rank and file of sellers worldwide who have piles of inventory and are suddenly barred from marketing their goods to the customers they purchased them for.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Mountie said...

Note for our American readers Cobblers is English slang for balls

19 January 2007 at 17:33:00 GMT  

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