eBay Problem

Has anyone every had trouble with sellers using your own description and html to sell their items? I am selling a Rio Car on eBay and have had a problem with one particular seller of a Rio Car who insists on stealing my work. eBay cancelled his first auction for linking to a copy of a Rio Car picture on my server, but he has reposted his auction which still has about 80% of my original text or html. It is my understanding that using others item decsriptions to sell your own item is forbidden by eBay rules. Have a look at the two auctions and see what you think. Mine is the first link, his the second.

http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1334774364

http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1336077840

Yes, there was a previous discussion on this topic here on the BBS about a month ago.

Notify Ebay immediately that the user is plagarizing your auctions. They will get him terminated.

Thanks. I notified eBay last night when I saw his auction relisted. I have tried contacting the seller, but he is very uncooperative. I believe the topic to which you are referring was called "eBay Losers."

Rotate your images with a nasty porn pic or something like that.

I have done this in the past when people were stealing images/bandwidth.

The first Empeg auction layout I had was "borrowed" by a few sellers. I subsequently changed to a layout that only Netscape would submit to eBay. This seemed to fix the problem. For some reason eBay's programs do not like it when IE submits too many lines of html code or something like that. Look on their site, they specify to use Nutscrap if you have any problems with submitting auction html code...

I once spent a good 4 bloody hours trying to submit an auction. It finally worked with a LOT of editing and tweaking. In the end I got it to look the same as the original, but I had to move a lot of code around. I haven't had this problem recently.

Better than porn is changing your images to TEXT that says the seller is involved in a SCAM. Just say exactly what's being done.

Of course, this still takes up bandwidth from your site. If you don't care about bandwidth except for protecting your rights, just make the image HUGE. Come to think of it, you could always make an enormous gif which woulnd't take up too much space but would play havoc with the guy's layout.

Bruno

Don't forget about animated GIFs!

But then, you're not one or GIFs are you? In this case you should make an exception. :-D

Calvin

I use gifs all the time where appropriate. They're still far better supported than PNG, so you gots to use what you gots to use.

Bruno

you can always dub your ebay address across the whole picture on your website so not only will someone cruising your site see it and knows right where to go to buy it but if someone else copys it, thats free advertizing for you.just a thought..?

Shawn

With stuff like that you just have to make sure eBay doesn't think you're trying to use their site to advertise off-ebay sales. They'll make you replace it if they think that's the case. They want a piece of ALL the action...

Bruno

You could setup up your webserver so that it checks the "referrer" address, and responds accordingly....ie, real pics if the view is coming from your auctions, and a big black and white "I'm a loser" message if not

Actually the problem I am having is that the seller is using my html and text description to sell his unit. I wrote the description myself and set up the layout and he basically cut and paste 80% of my work into his auction. He is NOT using my bandwidth anymore (on his second attempt), just my intellectual property.

I've been thinking about this some more. Unless you're planning to sell loads more Empegs (highly unlikely), and he's planning to sell loads more Empegs (again highly unlikely), then he is not really hurting you in any way whatsover. Sure, it's plagurism, it's not nice, it's taking advantage of your hard work. But maybe you should let it go and take pride from the fact that he thought that your page was so good that he copied the whole darn thing.

As it stands you have virtually no comeback on this - you might persuade ebay to cancel his listing, but I'm sure that they would rather spend their time chasing down real fraudsters.

Actually, I had similar thoughts, although I would benefit if his auction was removed because it is in competition with my own auction. I do indeed have more to sell, although not that many. The whole concept of my work going to help a competitor sell his item just does not sit well with me.

Just my thoughts.

I agree. If you were holding a garage sale and someone down the street stole your signs for thier garage sale on the same day, you'd call the police for theft.
He IS stealing your business if you went to the effort of constructing your site.

They wouldn't be stealing signs, they'd just be making signs like yours. Nothing wrong with that.

Or, the alternative is to wait to sell your unit until there aren't any more on ebay. As SonicBlue have completely run out of stock, and carplayer.com claim to be running low, the supply/demand thing is swinging more and more into sellers' favor.


Yz33d, I was going to make some snide remark about your lack of understanding, but I can't be arsed.

Well what do want? A cookie?