ebay's Latest Re "Circumvention of Fees"

ChrisCar_2 · 20 May 2008 at 2:25PM

ebay has pulled some more of my listings.

We sell knitting yarn, among other things, and a fortnight ago ebay pulled some listings because we had a link to a page with knitting terms and conversions on it eg UK needles size 8 = US size 6 = 4mm
I had removed all the external links from the page.
The site it's on (which couldn't be clicked through to) doesn't have a single 'Buy it' button anywhere.
The listings were pulled because the page had our phone number on it!
Apparently we were encouraging people to buy outside of ebay, through direct sales.

I spend two days removing the link from all our live listings.
While I was at it I revised our About Me page and put our contact details on it, but no clickable links.
I put the following text on the listings, with a clickable link to the about me page -
Anything else you want to know, feel free to email us and ask. We'll help if we can.
There's further contact info on our About Me page.

I didn't even put a clickable link to any web site on the About Me page as, just in passing, the ebay rep I talked to said this wasn't allowed any more. Though I've had no confirmation of that.

Then over the weekend some more listings were pulled.
The reason given was the new wording.
I queried it as by UK law a business seller has to display their contact details.
This is part of their reply -

"It is allowed to put your contact details into the About Me page,
however you cannot advertise within the item description that those
information can be found on you About Me page. Otherwise this is
considered as Circumvention of fees and trying to encouraging member to
buy through Direct Sales. "

Now, I'm sure there is some way to put business address details on every listing, up at the top, hidden among the feedback, other items and contact seller links.
Anyone know how to do that?
I've hunted the help pages and all I've discovered is that ebay don't keep their help pages up to date.
I remember looking at the instructions when they brought out ebay express, but can't find any trace of them now.