UPDATE – Knowing what we know now, Ebay probably didn’t restrict his account due to Pirateship. It was most likely due to a ramp in sales.
A reader in my Slack group got his Ebay account restricted this morning and got the following email:
A review of your eBay account has raised some concern that your use of services may not meet the guidelines in eBay’s User Agreement. As a result, we’ve taken the following action on your account:
– Selling privileges have been temporarily restricted. You won’t be able to list new items or revise current listings. You’re also not allowed to register a new account.
– Some or all of your listings may have been removed. Any removed items will be listed further down in this email.To appeal this restriction, you’ll need to:
– Provide proof of delivery for all of the items sold on your eBay account.
— The easiest way to do this is to submit tracking numbers for each of the items posted. This will help show buyers more of your selling history and will also allow us to confirm that your items have been posted. To upload tracking, please visit the adding tracking information page: http://pages.ebay.com/help/pay/upload-tracking.html
— You can also verify delivery by providing the feedback you have received from buyers.
Activity on your account didn’t follow our policy. More specific details are provided below.
Once these requirements have been met, please reply to this email and we’ll begin the appeal process. Also, please be aware that we may ask you to provide additional information to appeal this restriction.
After talking to him, it seems he got it because he had used Pirateship a lot over the weekend. Pirateship is a way to get free USPS cubic pricing, which is cheaper if your package is in a small cubic volumes. For 90% of packages, the pricing is the same as Ebay’s shipping discount, so that’s why I was a bit surprised the reader shipped so much out with Pirateship.
Ebay’s concern is that when you don’t ship out via their or Paypal’s system, they actually don’t know WHERE you shipped the item. You’re only entering the tracking number. For all Ebay knows, you could be shipping it to your buddy across town. So if you have “A LOT” of sales on the weekend and they are all in limbo, that’s a red flag to Ebay just because they don’t know where and what you shipped out.
Lesson Learned for today – try to use Ebay’s shipping service at least 90% of the time so they know the address you are shipping items to.