eBay temporarily suspended GoAntiques' account for violating eBay's policies regarding prohibited and restricted items. GoAntiques is an online antique mall consisting of items from 1800 dealers from 29 countries. Dealers can list items on eBay Live Auctions under the GoAntiques Live Auctions name (User ID GoAntiquesLive). GoAntiques aggregates merchandise from its dealers for each auction, and winning bidders are charged a buyer's premium of up to 17.5 percent.
GoAntiques President Jim Kamnikar said they have been conducting auctions on eBay Live Auctions since March 2004, and this is the first time the account has been suspended. He blamed the problem on issues relating to communications.
GoAntiques lists 40,000 items a month on eBay Live Auctions, and they receive an average of 5-8 notices a month from eBay informing them that an item is being removed for violating eBay's policy. Kamnikar said nowhere on those emails does it warn GoAntiques that violating auctions can lead to a suspension. "The emails do not sound like a reprimand," he said. (A link in the email leads to a website that does spell out the possibility of a suspension, however, like this page http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/offensive.html.)
On November 30, eBay's Trust & Safety department called GoAntiques to inform them they had had enough violations in the last 60 days to warrant a warning and that, if it continued, eBay might need to suspend the account.
"We immediately sprung into action," said Kamnikar, who said he put stricter measures into place in the auction vetting process.
Prior to the November 30 warning, GoAntiques relied on filters to catch words that might indicate an item was on eBay's prohibited list. Two GoAntiques administrators would manually review items caught in the filter. After November 30, the administrators manually reviewed all 10,000 auction items each week in addition to using the filter. Kamnikar said he also made the decision to go beyond eBay's policy to try and comply by banning all military and animal related items.
Despite the manual review of all items, eBay sent two notices to GoAntiques in December, warranting the 14-day suspension that began on December 19.
Jim Kamnikar said some rules are challenging in that not all of the policies spell out restrictions clearly. He used toy guns as an example. eBay bans guns on its site, but allows the sale of toy guns. Kamnikar said nowhere on eBay does it state that photos of toy guns must have an orange blaze on the barrel to indicate they are toy guns. Kamnikar said he did not even know what an orange blaze was.
"It makes it a challenge to comply to something that is not written," he said.
Kamnikar also said he did not know how many violations an auction house was allowed to have in a 60-day period. "I'm glad eBay has this group that polices the site," he said, referring to eBay's Trust & Safety department. "It benefits sellers and buyers. However, it would dramatically help if they were clearer on the thresholds of violations." He said it also would have helped him if policy violation notices contained warnings that continued violations may result in suspension.
