Sellers Beware: In-Port Ebay Listing Violation

I listed a bunch of in-port etopps cards for 7 days to end Saturday night. One of them is a 2008 Steve Slaton. It had bids since being listed last Saturday.

It was just pulled by ebay.

I got an email with the subject line: MC018 eBay Listing Removed: Miscategorization of Digitally Delivered Goods.

Here's what the email says:
You recently listed the following auction-style listing:

400004427345 - 1 - Steve Slaton 2008 - etopps


The listing was removed because it violated the eBay Miscategorization of Digitally Delivered Goods policy. The violation occurred when you included the following information in your listing:

This auction is for an in-portfolio card. This card will be transferred to your eTopps portfolio.






We notified members who placed bids on the item that the listing has been canceled.

To ensure that members can find what they're looking for quickly and easily, items need to be listed in the appropriate category. Sellers need to choose the category that most accurately describes their item.

*****Please read this important information to help you bring your future listings into compliance.

Digital goods are often reproduced at little to no cost to the seller. On eBay, this creates the potential for Feedback Manipulation. To preserve the integrity of the Feedback system, all goods that can be digitally downloaded or transferred electronically (including e-mail delivery) must be listed using the Classified Ad format in the Everything Else>Information Products category only.

Please note that if the appropriate changes are not made, it may lead to the indefinite suspension of your account.*****

For more information on the eBay policy, please visit:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-categorization.html

Needless to say this is not a good sign. Anyone listing an in-port is a sitting duck. This reminds me of when people were getting notices of listing violations when cardtarget was listing cards for people's ebay/etopps accounts for CTM and people were getting suspended from ebay.

I forwarded this email to Mark Sapir and hopefully he'll be able to contact ebay or be able to make an adjustment to the listing category for etopps cards or something so no one else will have their listings pulled and get the slap on the hand that I got.

Strange how this pandora's box gets opened right before Halloween.