Michael Ewert filed a class-action lawsuit against eBay in April for allegedly failing to give him the full duration for his auction listings. The complaint states that eBay represents that customers can select an eBay auction to last for a specific period of time and that the auction will begin when submitted, but alleges that in reality, "customers routinely receive less auction time than they paid and selected."

Attorney David Fish wrote about it on his blog, reporting that the lawsuit alleges eBay violated a number of laws, including the California Auction Act by making misrepresentations in conducting its auctioneering business. Fish writes, "The lawsuit seeks a number of remedies, including a "$1,000 per Class member civil penalty", which comes out to over 1 billion dollars in damages if one does the math. -that's a lot, even for Ebay." (http://tinyurl.com/2qlvph)

Sellers have been aware for many years that it takes a certain number of hours to have listings show up in search results due to the time it takes to index new listings, and that is the issue at the heart of Ewert's complaint.

However, eBay has added to the delay since the Fall of 2006 when it instituted a new Trust & Safety measure to combat counterfeit listings. eBay spokesperson Catherine England explained the new initiative to AuctionBytes in November (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m11/i29/s01).

Sellers generally have two points of contention about listing delays, one being less exposure in search results due to being searchable for fewer hours. Ewert's complaint points to posts on eBay discussion boards by sellers who complained their listings were delayed, including one from May 2006 who complained it had been 21 hours since he had posted a listing and it still had not shown up in eBay search results, despite being visible in his account information (Post #39 in this thread: http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000275679).

The other point of contention is reduced visibility due to eBay's default sort by Newly Listed. Previously, when a listing was delayed, it would not show up high in Newly Listed items, so fewer (if any) shoppers saw the delayed listings in default searches.

In April 2007, eBay announced a "proactive fraud reduction" initiative, containing three key changes:

• eBay began expanding the number of listings that were being delayed for review
• eBay began notifying sellers of delays during the listing process using a pop-up warning
• eBay began displaying delayed listings at the top of search results when sorted by Newly Listed based on when they were made visible in search as opposed to when they were listed.

When AuctionBytes asked in April whether eBay would provide any recompense for sellers of listings that got less exposure than they normally would have, eBay spokesperson Nichola Sharpe replied via email:

"No, eBay does not charge for listing time by the hour or by the day, so we do not refund in this situation. We certainly work to minimize any impact to our sellers, however, by ensuring that listings are indexed as soon as possible. To improve this for our sellers, we've made the change to ensure listings become visible at the top of Browse listings pages and in "newly listed" sort option as soon as they are made visible in Search, regardless of the time when they were listed." (http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2007/4/1176346322.html)

It's interesting to note that the plaintiff takes great pains to argue that eBay is an auction house, something eBay has for many years stated it is not. Ewert states in his complaint that if eBay is not an auction house, then eBay failed to disclose to sellers that they must abide by California's Auction Act. "If eBay is not an auctioneer and/or auction house under California's Auction Act, then it is the innocent eBay customer that is the auctioneer."

He goes on to point to eBay's site about government regulation (http://www.ebaymainstreet.com/mainstreet), stating, "Yet, eBay knows that without a license customers could be subject to thousands of dollars in fines for selling on eBay."

David Fish posted a copy of the complaint on his site (the URL links to a PDF file):
http://fishlawfirm.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/ebay%20complaint.pdf