Ebay Duplicate Listing Policy. How Vague?

It appears that ebay is on the loose again removing "duplicate" stamp listings. All they seem to check is the title. It doesn't seem to matter that the image is different, the price is different or that the condition is different. Untrained ebay staff don't seem to be able to notice that every 19th and early 20th Century stamp is different. According to ebay, "duplicate" listings could lead to a bad buyer experience. To me, a bad buyer experience is slow ebay search returning too many irrelevant choices and hiding all of the stamps buyers would want to see.

When the policy was first announced a couple of years ago, many wondered the exact definition of the "policy". Apparently, the policy is "we know it when we see it", meaning that anyone with duplicate listing titles could be vulnerable to a half-blind agent pulling their listings down.

The policy should be simple. Could the listing be combined with another listing to create a multiple-quantity listing? Generally this would be a bad idea with stamps because only one stamp would be pictured. Most buyers would avoid listings that say, this stamp is "similar" to the one shown. (Some use generic scans for group lots, leaving the buyer blind, so to speak.) Since it is infeasible to sell older stamps using multiple-quantity listings, duplicates do not exist, really.

Is this how to run a legitimate business?

Clark

Agreed that ebay's policy is ill-founded as usual.

If it's just based on the title - rearrange the words in the title a bit.

Or add an asterisk or number to differentiate. Though this cuts into the listing if you need all the space for the description. It's their game no matter what we may think of their rules. The trick is to get around those rules.

Just add a ! ** or any symbol at the end of any listing they deem duplicate. I do that all the time

I believe that adding an inventory number or SKU to the title may be key word spamming and could cause the title to drop in Best match search. Also, I believe that extraneous text in the title looks unprofessional. While it is possible to check for duplicate titles using a SQL Server query, most sellers don't have their listings in a database and few of those know enough SQL to write a query:

USE SixBit_BT;

WITH DupTitle_CTE(Title, DupCount)

AS

(SELECT REPLACE(Title, ',', '') AS Title, COUNT(1) As DupCount
FROM Items itm
WHERE dbo.GetTotalOnHandForItemID(ItemID) > 0
GROUP BY REPLACE(Title, ',', '')
HAVING COUNT(1) > 1)

SELECT ItemID, itm.Title
FROM Items itm
JOIN DupTitle_CTE cte
ON REPLACE(itm.Title, ',', '') = cte.Title
WHERE dbo.GetTotalOnHandForItemID(itm.ItemID) > 0
ORDER BY itm.Title, itm.ItemID

The query would be a bit faster is a table valued function was used to collect inventory information, but the function is part of the SixBit ecommerce database package.

Clark