Ebay Listing Removed: Duplicate Listing

A new one on me! This is the ebay email sent to me today.

ebay Listing Removed: Duplicate listing.

ebay is your place to give buyers the opportunity to purchase your products. We want to make sure buyers can easily find the items they want, so that they have the greatest shopping experience and come back for more. To help make items easy to find, we have a policy that doesn't allow duplicate listings.

As such, we recently removed some of your listings because they were duplicates. We understand that you may not have been aware of this policy or that this may have been an oversight. Please take the time to review your listings and remove any other duplicates.

Here's a sample of the duplicate listings we removed. To see the full list, go to My ebay, click the "Activity" tab, and then click the "Unsold" link under the "Sell" heading.

(The Title of the two listings) 1999 Australia Olympic Torch Sport $1.20 High Value Used (The listings were on two different days.)



Following the guidelines below can help prevent further action on your account, such as limits to your buying and selling privileges:
-- If you have identical items for sale, please list them in a single fixed-price multiple quantity listing. If you have an active fixed price listing, we recommend revising it to increase the quantity.
-- Review any automated listing features to prevent these items from being relisted.
-- In addition to a fixed price listing, you may also offer a single auction-style listing if it doesn't include a Buy It Now price.
-- If you have more than one user ID, please review all of your listings because duplicates aren't allowed across accounts.

ebay definitely seems to be aligning itself more and more with the bigger sellers of new consumer items, and away from collectables and second-hand items, which used stamps essentially are! It seems obvious to us that you can't list 4 of the same sets of used stamps in one BIN listing, as each will differ in condition and cancels. But this ebay rule ignores such subtleties and is primarily aimed at the bulk seller of new items.
I don't know how you get around it, other than make a small change in the listing title to differentiate, which hopefully will be enough to fool whatever ebay software is identifying identical listings.
Other sellers seem to get around it, I woder what "tricks" they use?

Thanks for sharing that stampgal.

There were 5 listings with the same 5 listing on another day. All grouped together. I have done this many times before but with auction style listings.

I think someone has complained.

In the future at the end of a list title description I will simply put a number 1 or 2 or a or b to make the listing different.

As I double up when a listing suits the stamp theme of 2 different listing days.