eBay’s policies dizzingly complex
Even Matt Halprin can’t figure them out
We now have over 150 policies designed to keep the eBay marketplace healthy and to maintain a safe place to buy and sell. We recognized that some of our policies were hard to understand, even for me.
For instance, check out all the restrictions on sellers. As a seller on the site, it is your responsbility to know these rules. The problem is, if you wanted to look hard enough, you could find almost any seller on eBay in violation of one policy or another.
This doesn’t sound like a problem until you consider that most violations are reported by competitors. So there’s this whole mini-battle going on around sellers in categories all the time of reporting bad listings from their competitors, etc. Is this good or bad? I think in some cases it is good — as it removes blatantly obvious policy violations. In some ways it is also encourages a vigilante mentality on a site which is supposed to be about “community” and people being basically good.
Think it’s easy to run a marketplace? This is the sort of stuff Google has to look forward to. Here are Google Base’s policies now. In 2 years, it will be interesting to reflect back on how much it might grow.