Ebay bans me due to ramp in sales

On Monday, April 6, Ebay sent me an email titled “MC011 Your eBay selling account has been restricted.” Here’s the email:

I thought this was odd since I only had 2 pending cases out against me, waiting for buyers to ship back the item. I also had no Paypal cases. I then tried to reply to the email stating that, and got an error back saying the email address doesn’t get read. I later found out you need to reply back via Ebay’s messaging program.

Five days later (yes it took them that long to respond, they sent me this:

Hello Vinh,

We received your appeal for your eBay account and appreciate you taking the time to gather the required documentation. We understand if this process has been inconvenient for you and we want to continue processing your appeal as quickly as possible. In order for us to complete the review of your account, we ask that you please provide some additional information. We have outlined the requirements below:

• Documentation that shows that you purchased the item(s) recently listed for sale on eBay. Documentation that will help us verify your items can include either manufacture invoices or receipts. Unfortunately, we will be unable to accept photos of the items to fulfill this requirement. (NOTE: This documentation must show your suppliers’ information, items purchased, quantity purchased, price per unit and your payment information.)

We appreciate you taking the time and effort to compile this information. Please upload the above requested information to the following link below:

https://ocsnext.ebay.com/ocs/mudcwf?deptName=USRiskManagement

1. Click on the above link and sign in using your eBay user ID and password.
2. Click ‘Continue’
3. Select the documents needing to be uploaded by clicking ‘Browse’.. Once they are selected, choose the Document Type from the drop down list.
4. Select send and wait for the confirmation to appear to ensure your documents have been submitted for review

— Note —

• It may take up to 3 business days to review your information.
• All documents submitted will be destroyed after we review them.

We appreciate your cooperation in resolving this matter as quickly as possible and look forward to receiving your documentation.

I had read that others recently got a similar request when they were selling too many things too fast of late. I figured they wanted all the receipts from my Nintendo Switches. You see, over the weekend of 4/6, I had sold about $6.5K of Nintendo Switches. So I sent them a massive PDF file of all the receipts from the Switches. I also had over 200 listings at the time and wasn’t sure if they wanted receipts for all 200 listings (which is fucking ridiculous) or just the Switches, which would make more sense. So I uploaded the receipt and waited…

Three days later, they sent me this:

Hello Vinh,

We received your appeal for your eBay account and appreciate you taking the time to gather the required documentation. Unfortunately, after reviewing the submitted documentation we noticed that it was either incomplete or illegible. We understand if this process has been inconvenient for you and we want to continue processing your appeal as quickly as possible. In order for us to complete the review of your account, we ask that you please provide some additional information. We have outlined the requirements below:

Please also allow us to explain what information we still need:

– A copy of a recent credit card statement, bank statement showing the payment of the receipts provided and the gift cards used on some of these receipts. Your name and billing address should be visible, and consistent with the information registered to your eBay account.

– Documentation that shows that you purchased the item(s) recently listed for sale on eBay. Documentation that will help us verify your items can include either manufacture invoices or receipts. Unfortunately, we will be unable to accept photos of the items to fulfill this requirement. (NOTE: This documentation must show your suppliers’ information, items purchased, quantity purchased, price per unit and your payment information.)

**We received the invoices for the Nintendo Switch Consoles and the Logitech Webcams, we are looking for Invoices or Receipts for all items you are listing.  

We appreciate you taking the time and effort to compile this information. Please upload the above requested information to the following link below:

So now they wanted receipts for the gift cards I had used. So I sent in a picture of the grocery store receipts that I bough the Amazon gift cards and then my credit card billing statement. I then uploaded 7 more receipts of other items I had. Once again, I wasn’t going to upload 200 receipts cuz that’s nuts, especially since some items were used items that I’d never have the receipts for.

Three days later, I get this email:

Hello Vinh,

We are committed to reducing both fraud and negative buying experiences on eBay. To maintain a safe marketplace, we sometimes restrict selling activity, end active items, or suspend accounts until an additional review can be completed. We have completed an additional review of your account and show that your account was originally restricted because it was in violation of eBay policy and your behavior posed a risk to the eBay community.

Because of this, we have decided that your account will remain indefinitely restricted from selling. We have taken this action out of concern for the safety and integrity of the eBay Community. Due to eBay policy, we cannot provide you with more specific information.

We understand that this situation may be frustrating; however, although future emails from you will be read, we will be unable to respond to any further requests to reinstate your selling privileges.

Please keep in mind that members who are restricted are prohibited from registering new accounts with eBay, or selling on eBay using any existing accounts. Although, you are still eligible to purchase items with this account, please note that eBay reserves the right to suspend existing accounts as well as new accounts opened by anyone in the same household of a restricted user or by any other associates of a restricted user.

Yup, so my 5 year old, 2000 positive feedback account just got wiped out. This one didn’t hurt as much as the first time they banned me (that account was 15 years old with almost 2K feedback to.) I did $165K of Ebay sales last year, so that’s around $16K in fees I paid them. In Q1, I did $64.5K in sales alone. Just in those 5 days in April, I did $20.5K. So Ebay is going to lose a lot of revenue from me, all because they think I was stealing stolen Switches or whatnot. By the way, my current stats:

Other Selling Avenues

Before this recent ban, I was like 98% Ebay and 2% Amazon. Once I got the ban, I started selling on Facebook and OfferUp and even tried LetGo. Surprisingly, I was making quite a bit of sales on FB and OfferUp and my margins were way higher. During that weekend, I was selling the Switches on Ebay for about $430 average. After 10% in fees and $15 shipping, my net was only $372. The first weekend I was banned, I was selling Switches locally for $400-$425, thus making $30-$50 MORE per Switch. Sure, Ebay is more scalable, but if you only have a handful of Switches to sell, just try to sell them locally if you have time. The funny thing is that one of the Switches was sold to someone in WA state, so they paid around $490 for it. Ever since Ebay started charging sales tax, people are checking FB/OfferUp to avoid the tax. So if you’re in a big city, give local a try.

I even tried Mercari and made 3 sales on that – 2 video games for the exact same price I would have sold it for on Ebay and a webcam that went for about $5-$10 less than Ebay. I don’t have a ton of experience with Mercari, but it has a few things that are better for sellers – a) the buyer can only raise an issue within 3 days of delivery, so no 5 month chargebacks and b) there is no Paypal bullshit. Mercari is their own payment processor so I think as long as you ship the item and it’s delivered, after 3 days, the sale is FINAL! Granted some things just don’t sell as well on Mercari as Ebay, but it seems SOME things will fetch similar prices (like video games.)

A few months ago, Ebay took down one of my listings for a copyright infringement claim. I wasn’t sure where to sell the items I had left, but I found an app called Grailed and now moving them for $20 higher than what I was moving them for on Ebay. Of course there is StockX for sneakers and stuff (I had already moved quite a bit to them before Ebay banned me though.) So really, there was no need to be 98% Ebay before my ban.

Going forward, I’m definitely going to try to lean more on local sales, especially for hot items. I’ve got some other stuff that I’ll try to move via Facebook Groups as well. I’ll let this cool down a bit and open a new Ebay account cuz there are still some things that people only check Ebay for. The main lesson learned here is – don’t run too hot on Ebay. If I hadn’t sold so many Switches, I would have been fine. The odd thing is that Ebay usually has selling limits in place, so I’m not sure why I didn’t trigger that and they stop me before letting me sell as much as I did. Go figure. Fuck you Ebay.