Warning from eBay sellers – What to do if it happens to me?
Summary: The discussion covered the topic 'Warning letters for eBay sellers – What to do if it happens to me?' Several participants spoke up, but their contributions did not contain any substantive information.
Whether small or large merchants: Anyone who is active in online commerce must comply with legal requirements. Otherwise, a warning letter can follow. In today's podcast talk, we clarify the most important points for all merchants around the topic of warning letters. What exactly is that? How often does a warning letter for an eBay store happen? What can I do to prevent it? And what if it still happens?
Isabell: Hello, dear listeners, and a very warm welcome to our new podcast episode for our merchants and, of course, everyone who wants to become one. I hope you’re feeling the same way we are and that listening to us on Wednesday evenings has now become part of your routine. Joining us again, of course, are my two valued podcast colleagues David and Tino as well.
David: Hello everyone from me, David, and you’re right, Isabell, it’s really become second nature that we get together here every two weeks and talk about exciting topics. Today it’s especially exciting when something has happened that, ideally, should never happen at all.
Tino: Exactly, and first of all hello from me too, I’m Tino, and yes, David, that really sums it up pretty perfectly. At best, our merchants don’t actually have to use the knowledge we want to share today. But if it does come to that, then this podcast is perfect today. For our topic about warning letters for eBay sellers, we’ve invited our in-house expert Tilmann Kuhla. Hello Tilmann, or should we say Dr. Tilmann? Actually Dr. Tiemann sounds cooler.
Tilmann: For today, let’s stick with Tilmann. Hello, I’m happy to be here.
Isabell: Hello Tilmann from me too. Before we get into the topic of warning letters, tell us a little bit about yourself first.
Tilmann: Yes, I’ve been working in eBay’s legal department for eight and a half years and take care of the areas we so elegantly call General Compliance and Contracts? Since we call everything in English, what does that actually mean? It means I make sure that eBay complies with the laws in Germany and that our sellers are able to comply with the laws. I’m not responsible for making sure every seller has a legal notice. But I am responsible for making sure every seller can have one. In addition, we take care of Contracts, which is not quite such a difficult word, meaning we conclude contracts with lots of different partners. You spoke with Steven recently, so the logistics contracts are of course something we’re involved in, but also other contracts that eBay concludes, all kinds of them from small to large, we’re always involved.
David: That makes the whole legal topic more interesting than I expected before, that’s definitely good. But I also think it’s an area where our listeners don’t necessarily have immediate expertise, so I’m really glad you’re here and of course we’ve prepared a few questions, and I’d say let’s dive right in. Tilmann, what exactly is a warning letter anyway?
Tilmann: You have to imagine it like this: there are different ways to regulate a market. One way is to have lots of authorities, with lots of people sitting there and checking that everyone follows the rules. That’s partly how it works in the UK. There are different institutions there that monitor compliance with market rules by market participants. In Germany, a long time ago, people decided it might be more efficient in some respects to leave market regulation to the market itself. That means we have a competitor, so you, David, for example, sell on eBay and I sell there too, and I don’t follow the rules, then you can send me a warning letter — that’s the nasty word — and that means you instruct a lawyer to list exactly which rules I haven’t followed and tell me, Tilmann, please follow these rules from now on and sign this please, I’ve enclosed something here. It already says Tilmann Kuhla at the bottom, you can sign it perfectly. Please sign this cease-and-desist declaration with a penalty clause saying that you won’t do it again in future, and because it’s so lovely, you can also pay my lawyer. Here, I don’t know, €500 for this one letter — that’s a warning letter.
Tino: So you already mentioned the nasty word warning letter. In people’s ears, warning letters are of course always a bit negative. So what do you think, is it good, or rather what do we at eBay think, that warning letters even exist?
Tilmann: Yes, that’s true, Tino, it has a very negative connotation for us. But the basic principle of warning letters is actually really good, because it means that everyone has to follow the same rules and everyone can tell everyone else to follow the rules too. We at eBay generally think that’s a good thing. The challenge is a bit, and that’s why it has become a nasty word, that there are some players in the market who don’t actually run their own business, but have turned this warning-letter thing into a business, so they pretend to run an online shop or they run a small online shop, but that’s actually not their main source of income — instead, they basically focus on finding mistakes in others. There are a few competitors who do that, but above all there are also, I’ll now put quotation marks in the air, so-called “warning-letter associations”; I’ll use IDO as an example, and that is viewed critically again and again, whether they’re actually behaving completely correctly there. They send hundreds of warning letters every day for minor violations and then try to make a lot of money through contractual penalties — we’ll come to that in a moment — and that’s really not the point. So, basically, the warning-letter principle is good, but there are some who abuse it a bit, and of course we don’t like that.
Isabell: And what do you mean by contractual penalties? You said just now we’d come back to that.
Tilmann: Let’s talk about that right away, Isabell. So contractual penalties mean first I get this letter, as I just described in response to David’s question, and now I submit this cease-and-desist declaration because, well, I don’t know, I just sign it, “nice that they already enclosed that, I don’t even need to hire a lawyer myself”, so I sign nicely, send it back, and two weeks later it turns out I’ve now, let’s say, forgotten — sorry, now it’s getting a bit more legalistic, but you did invite me — I forgot to link to the EU’s dispute resolution platform, and now I have 500 listings on eBay and I corrected it in 498, but in 2 listings I somehow forgot or they were out of stock and then we have them again, so somehow I make a mistake. Now it gets serious, because the person who warned me now comes back and says you said you’d never do it again, and then it’s so-called the second violation, and then the contractual penalty becomes due. And that can definitely be in the four digits, it can quickly be €3,000 or maybe with 2 violations just €6,000. That gets very unpleasant very quickly. That’s the contractual penalty.
Isabell: And you just said it can cost a few thousand euros — is there some kind of minimum amount for a warning letter, or is it sometimes just a written warning without a monetary penalty behind it?
Tilmann: Exactly, so one step back. The warning letter is associated with the assertion of costs. What I’m basically saying is: I want you to pay my lawyer now, which means on the first violation, the other party — the competitor — doesn’t actually earn anything from it at first, only their lawyer does. On the second violation, that’s when this contractual penalty can come into play. Then I really have to pay money to the other side. There are, I think we could talk about that for too long, lots of disputes about how much a contractual penalty is allowed to be, so I’d remember that it’s probably in the range of €3,000–€5,000 for a first violation, but the challenge is that it can of course apply to many listings, and then each listing counts as a violation, which very quickly becomes a very unpleasantly high amount for the merchants involved.
Tino: Tilmann, when I think of reminders, I always think of my TV licence bill, but that’s a different topic. What is the main issue most often involved in warning letters?
Tilmann: Yes, I can’t give private legal advice for your TV licence problems, Tino.
Tino: Let’s leave that one.
Tilmann: I don’t think our merchants are all that interested in it either.
Tino: Fair enough.
Tilmann: Okay, good, so back to it. The typical topics are, as I already mentioned, these dispute resolution platforms. That’s actually a good idea. The EU thought, let’s introduce a dispute resolution platform where consumers can get in touch if they have a dispute with a business, for example a commercial seller. No one has to participate, but we have a rule that says everyone has to declare whether they participate or not, and if they don’t participate, even if they don’t participate, they still have to link to the dispute resolution platform. And after a bit of case law on this, we know the link has to be clickable. That’s, for example, a very typical problem, because the link somehow isn’t clickable because the HTML wasn’t embedded correctly — unfortunately a very tedious issue. We’ve seen warning letters for that quite often. Then there are very formal things, for example: you have to inform the consumer whether you store the contract text — you can already tell this is a bit formally legalistic — for the online offer, whether you store it or whether they have to store it themselves. Then there are, I mean these are really petty little issues, but then there are also things like base prices, for example. So if you think about it now, Tino, I need a new bottle... now everyone is excited to hear what he’s going to say, CK One, let’s be cautious, then you think about whether to buy 50 millilitres or 100, and so that you can compare it, great, you have to state the base price. How much does 100 millilitres actually cost in this bottle unit? And you just have to get that right, and there are always merchants who forget that, for example, with dishwasher tabs you also have to state base prices, namely when I buy a pack of dishwasher tabs, I have to say how much one tab costs so that people can compare. It’s all totally sensible, but it’s also really hard to keep all these rules straight. That was just the tip of the iceberg. We can’t talk about every problem.
Tino: I actually do need to ask a quick follow-up there, because I also deal with lots of sellers, and I remember that one seller from my area once had the challenge of getting a warning letter for a picture. Is that actually possible, so over an image in a listing, or was that lawful? Or how do you see it?
Tilmann: As a lawyer, I’d first say I can’t assess the individual case without seeing the file. So the problem is, the challenge is if you, well, it’s a copyright issue, a warning letter for a picture, then it’s like I can’t just search the internet for a nice picture and some, I’m thinking in your categories now, Lego set that someone else made and then use it for my offer on eBay. The person who created the image owns the copyright, and if I use the image without their consent, then they can send me a warning letter. That means, in abstract terms, whether that warning letter is now valid or not depends on whether you had rights to the image or not. So internally at eBay we always have to make sure that we have the rights to the images we use, and for sellers that applies too — either make the images yourself, in which case you are the creator, or license the images, then you won’t have any problem.
Isabell: We’ve now talked about warning letters for various reasons, but among our listeners we also have some people who aren’t yet selling commercially. Tilmann, is a warning letter something everyone has to expect, or are merchants also regularly confronted with them?
Tilmann: That’s an interesting question, Isabell, because I’m not sitting at the seller’s mailbox, so to speak, and know what arrives there. I only see things that may be passed on to us because sellers say there’s a mistake at eBay and I’ve now received a warning letter, or when sellers reach out to us for help. So generally speaking, I’d say yes, everyone has to expect to receive a warning letter, but of course there are things you can do. I think we also want to talk about that. So that everything maybe doesn’t happen. I wouldn’t say, and I’d also be the wrong person to say it doesn’t make sense to sell because the risk of warning letters is so high — you have to, it’s just an annoying topic, you have to deal with it, I’d say.
David: And you just said there are things you can do to reduce the risk of getting a warning letter — what would those be?
Tilmann: Now it gets a bit, sounds a bit like a commercial for my profession. There are very many lawyers in Germany. And what I, I mean, very clear advice for someone who runs an online shop, whether on eBay, on another marketplace or their own online shop, is that they need legal advice, and there are different ways to get that. There are institutions that offer that, but there are also good specialist lawyers for this area. Here are a few recommendations from me: if you as a seller have recently gone through a divorce or had to settle a traffic accident and therefore know a lawyer, then take that one — but just because they handled the divorce well or settled the traffic accident well doesn’t mean they also know how to set up a legal notice on eBay properly. I’d say you can of course go to Google and search for an internet law lawyer, that’s already good. So definitely look for people who specialize in this topic. But we at eBay also, because this topic matters to us and because we’re not allowed to advise merchants directly ourselves, brought a partner on board with Trusted Shops and spent quite a bit of money to buy a package from them so that sellers don’t have to buy it themselves. I don’t know whether I should go deeper into that now or build a bit more suspense.
David: You can go into a bit more detail. So, instead of the seller having to pay for it themselves, we covered the cost so the seller can benefit from our partner Trusted Shops. And what does the seller get there?
Tilmann: Exactly, it’s a bit like a commercial break, but what you get, you get for free. That’s actually okay for a commercial break, right? Sellers, you have to imagine it like this: there’s a basic set-up, like when you move into a new apartment, you need a few things right away, otherwise it’s really annoying, right? And you get this basic set-up through this Trusted Shops offer. So the most important thing you need is first of all a proper legal notice that says, Tilmann Kuhla, I live here and there, my email address and these things, or if I’m a company, the managing director, and then you need a withdrawal policy that explains under what conditions returns are possible, all highly formalized. You need terms and conditions that you can also add to eBay, and Trusted Shops has built a legal-text generator for that. It’s basically a front end where you enter your data and it generates these texts. And beyond that there are very specific questions. So if I think of you, Tino, and toys, there are of course regulations intended to protect children, for example things that must not be too small, or then there’s a symbol on them saying “dangerous for 0 to 3 years” or something like that. Trusted Shops also has a library there, where for example if I sell wine or textiles or toys or TVs, there are always special rules for many products. Welcome, thanks, EU. And Trusted Shops has a PDF for each product, and you can read exactly: what do I need to pay attention to for this product? It’s actually super practical and it’s free. And if you want to go beyond that, you can of course pay for some things too. But even with the free part you can already get pretty far. One more quick thing, I’ve already been talking for ages. Every eBay seller with a shop subscription can use this, so from the smallest shop it’s included, so to speak. We’ll also be able to link it here in the show notes, as they say, and there’s an instruction on how to claim it.
Isabell: We’ve now talked about some things we can do preventively as merchants, including the Trusted Shops program. What can you recommend if it does happen after all?
Tilmann: Yes, I hinted a bit earlier in jest that someone sends you a form with it, very simple, even your own name is already pre-printed, and here in Germany we’re all wonderfully trained: if my name is written somewhere, I just sign it. Yes, please don’t. So the advice is basically the same as before. Definitely get legal help, and by no means sign the pre-formulated cease-and-desist declaration. Exactly because of the problem I just described. First we need to look at what the violation actually is. Can I prevent the violation in future? Then of course you mustn’t send it back before you’ve fixed the violation. So if I say yes, I solemnly promise, on payment of a contractual penalty if I do it again, always state the base price, and I haven’t even corrected it yet, then at that moment I’m immediately violating the cease-and-desist declaration. That means you need legal help, from a lawyer or also from Trusted Shops or a similar institution that knows this stuff well. So again, please don’t ask an eye doctor to fix your knee, i.e. don’t ask the divorce lawyer whether they can help with internet law. The lawyers will of course say yes, because they can make money from it, maybe, but they still may not actually be able to do it.
Tino: Thank you very much, Tilmann, for being able to tell us such exciting things here about warning letters. I’ve also learned a bit for myself about TV licence bills and reminders, but that’s a different topic. We’ll talk about that another time. Maybe not here, on the podcast. But right at the end, we always ask our guests one last question, and of course we’ll ask you that today too, and that question would be: what was the last thing you bought on eBay?
Tilmann: Well, I was already able to prepare a bit for the question because I heard that you asked Steven the same one, so the last thing I bought was last weekend, namely 5 Ninjago trading cards for my son, who had very specific ideas about which cards were still missing, and the classic case: if you can’t find it anywhere, you’ll probably find it on eBay. We were able to choose the cards very precisely, and then I was absolutely delighted to discover at the end of the order that, luckily, they were all from the same seller, because that meant we got a big shipping discount and child happy, dad happy, all good.
Isabell: Yes, very nice, Tilmann. I always find it exciting to see the different things our guests find on eBay. Well, that’s it from us for this week, and we hope our listeners were able to take away as much as we did today, and the next episode of our podcast will be in 2 weeks as usual.
David: We’re of course also very happy to receive your feedback on our podcast — as always, feel free to leave a comment in the community. About your experiences, have you ever received a warning letter? How did you react? Or if you still have questions, we’ll be happy to pass them on to Tilmann and the team. As eBay, we obviously can’t solve questions about your legal issues, nor are we allowed to, so please, as Tilmann has said very often, contact your own legal counsel and otherwise feel free to leave us a like or a subscription wherever you’re listening to us, if possible, and until next time.
Isabell: Thanks, Tilmann, for taking the time for us today, and then I’ll say goodbye!
Tilmann: My pleasure.
David: Hello everyone from me, David, and you’re right, Isabell, it’s really become second nature that we get together here every two weeks and talk about exciting topics. Today it’s especially exciting when something has happened that, ideally, should never happen at all.
Tino: Exactly, and first of all hello from me too, I’m Tino, and yes, David, that really sums it up pretty perfectly. At best, our merchants don’t actually have to use the knowledge we want to share today. But if it does come to that, then this podcast is perfect today. For our topic about warning letters for eBay sellers, we’ve invited our in-house expert Tilmann Kuhla. Hello Tilmann, or should we say Dr. Tilmann? Actually Dr. Tiemann sounds cooler.
Tilmann: For today, let’s stick with Tilmann. Hello, I’m happy to be here.
Isabell: Hello Tilmann from me too. Before we get into the topic of warning letters, tell us a little bit about yourself first.
Tilmann: Yes, I’ve been working in eBay’s legal department for eight and a half years and take care of the areas we so elegantly call General Compliance and Contracts? Since we call everything in English, what does that actually mean? It means I make sure that eBay complies with the laws in Germany and that our sellers are able to comply with the laws. I’m not responsible for making sure every seller has a legal notice. But I am responsible for making sure every seller can have one. In addition, we take care of Contracts, which is not quite such a difficult word, meaning we conclude contracts with lots of different partners. You spoke with Steven recently, so the logistics contracts are of course something we’re involved in, but also other contracts that eBay concludes, all kinds of them from small to large, we’re always involved.
David: That makes the whole legal topic more interesting than I expected before, that’s definitely good. But I also think it’s an area where our listeners don’t necessarily have immediate expertise, so I’m really glad you’re here and of course we’ve prepared a few questions, and I’d say let’s dive right in. Tilmann, what exactly is a warning letter anyway?
Tilmann: You have to imagine it like this: there are different ways to regulate a market. One way is to have lots of authorities, with lots of people sitting there and checking that everyone follows the rules. That’s partly how it works in the UK. There are different institutions there that monitor compliance with market rules by market participants. In Germany, a long time ago, people decided it might be more efficient in some respects to leave market regulation to the market itself. That means we have a competitor, so you, David, for example, sell on eBay and I sell there too, and I don’t follow the rules, then you can send me a warning letter — that’s the nasty word — and that means you instruct a lawyer to list exactly which rules I haven’t followed and tell me, Tilmann, please follow these rules from now on and sign this please, I’ve enclosed something here. It already says Tilmann Kuhla at the bottom, you can sign it perfectly. Please sign this cease-and-desist declaration with a penalty clause saying that you won’t do it again in future, and because it’s so lovely, you can also pay my lawyer. Here, I don’t know, €500 for this one letter — that’s a warning letter.
Tino: So you already mentioned the nasty word warning letter. In people’s ears, warning letters are of course always a bit negative. So what do you think, is it good, or rather what do we at eBay think, that warning letters even exist?
Tilmann: Yes, that’s true, Tino, it has a very negative connotation for us. But the basic principle of warning letters is actually really good, because it means that everyone has to follow the same rules and everyone can tell everyone else to follow the rules too. We at eBay generally think that’s a good thing. The challenge is a bit, and that’s why it has become a nasty word, that there are some players in the market who don’t actually run their own business, but have turned this warning-letter thing into a business, so they pretend to run an online shop or they run a small online shop, but that’s actually not their main source of income — instead, they basically focus on finding mistakes in others. There are a few competitors who do that, but above all there are also, I’ll now put quotation marks in the air, so-called “warning-letter associations”; I’ll use IDO as an example, and that is viewed critically again and again, whether they’re actually behaving completely correctly there. They send hundreds of warning letters every day for minor violations and then try to make a lot of money through contractual penalties — we’ll come to that in a moment — and that’s really not the point. So, basically, the warning-letter principle is good, but there are some who abuse it a bit, and of course we don’t like that.
Isabell: And what do you mean by contractual penalties? You said just now we’d come back to that.
Tilmann: Let’s talk about that right away, Isabell. So contractual penalties mean first I get this letter, as I just described in response to David’s question, and now I submit this cease-and-desist declaration because, well, I don’t know, I just sign it, “nice that they already enclosed that, I don’t even need to hire a lawyer myself”, so I sign nicely, send it back, and two weeks later it turns out I’ve now, let’s say, forgotten — sorry, now it’s getting a bit more legalistic, but you did invite me — I forgot to link to the EU’s dispute resolution platform, and now I have 500 listings on eBay and I corrected it in 498, but in 2 listings I somehow forgot or they were out of stock and then we have them again, so somehow I make a mistake. Now it gets serious, because the person who warned me now comes back and says you said you’d never do it again, and then it’s so-called the second violation, and then the contractual penalty becomes due. And that can definitely be in the four digits, it can quickly be €3,000 or maybe with 2 violations just €6,000. That gets very unpleasant very quickly. That’s the contractual penalty.
Isabell: And you just said it can cost a few thousand euros — is there some kind of minimum amount for a warning letter, or is it sometimes just a written warning without a monetary penalty behind it?
Tilmann: Exactly, so one step back. The warning letter is associated with the assertion of costs. What I’m basically saying is: I want you to pay my lawyer now, which means on the first violation, the other party — the competitor — doesn’t actually earn anything from it at first, only their lawyer does. On the second violation, that’s when this contractual penalty can come into play. Then I really have to pay money to the other side. There are, I think we could talk about that for too long, lots of disputes about how much a contractual penalty is allowed to be, so I’d remember that it’s probably in the range of €3,000–€5,000 for a first violation, but the challenge is that it can of course apply to many listings, and then each listing counts as a violation, which very quickly becomes a very unpleasantly high amount for the merchants involved.
Tino: Tilmann, when I think of reminders, I always think of my TV licence bill, but that’s a different topic. What is the main issue most often involved in warning letters?
Tilmann: Yes, I can’t give private legal advice for your TV licence problems, Tino.
Tino: Let’s leave that one.
Tilmann: I don’t think our merchants are all that interested in it either.
Tino: Fair enough.
Tilmann: Okay, good, so back to it. The typical topics are, as I already mentioned, these dispute resolution platforms. That’s actually a good idea. The EU thought, let’s introduce a dispute resolution platform where consumers can get in touch if they have a dispute with a business, for example a commercial seller. No one has to participate, but we have a rule that says everyone has to declare whether they participate or not, and if they don’t participate, even if they don’t participate, they still have to link to the dispute resolution platform. And after a bit of case law on this, we know the link has to be clickable. That’s, for example, a very typical problem, because the link somehow isn’t clickable because the HTML wasn’t embedded correctly — unfortunately a very tedious issue. We’ve seen warning letters for that quite often. Then there are very formal things, for example: you have to inform the consumer whether you store the contract text — you can already tell this is a bit formally legalistic — for the online offer, whether you store it or whether they have to store it themselves. Then there are, I mean these are really petty little issues, but then there are also things like base prices, for example. So if you think about it now, Tino, I need a new bottle... now everyone is excited to hear what he’s going to say, CK One, let’s be cautious, then you think about whether to buy 50 millilitres or 100, and so that you can compare it, great, you have to state the base price. How much does 100 millilitres actually cost in this bottle unit? And you just have to get that right, and there are always merchants who forget that, for example, with dishwasher tabs you also have to state base prices, namely when I buy a pack of dishwasher tabs, I have to say how much one tab costs so that people can compare. It’s all totally sensible, but it’s also really hard to keep all these rules straight. That was just the tip of the iceberg. We can’t talk about every problem.
Tino: I actually do need to ask a quick follow-up there, because I also deal with lots of sellers, and I remember that one seller from my area once had the challenge of getting a warning letter for a picture. Is that actually possible, so over an image in a listing, or was that lawful? Or how do you see it?
Tilmann: As a lawyer, I’d first say I can’t assess the individual case without seeing the file. So the problem is, the challenge is if you, well, it’s a copyright issue, a warning letter for a picture, then it’s like I can’t just search the internet for a nice picture and some, I’m thinking in your categories now, Lego set that someone else made and then use it for my offer on eBay. The person who created the image owns the copyright, and if I use the image without their consent, then they can send me a warning letter. That means, in abstract terms, whether that warning letter is now valid or not depends on whether you had rights to the image or not. So internally at eBay we always have to make sure that we have the rights to the images we use, and for sellers that applies too — either make the images yourself, in which case you are the creator, or license the images, then you won’t have any problem.
Isabell: We’ve now talked about warning letters for various reasons, but among our listeners we also have some people who aren’t yet selling commercially. Tilmann, is a warning letter something everyone has to expect, or are merchants also regularly confronted with them?
Tilmann: That’s an interesting question, Isabell, because I’m not sitting at the seller’s mailbox, so to speak, and know what arrives there. I only see things that may be passed on to us because sellers say there’s a mistake at eBay and I’ve now received a warning letter, or when sellers reach out to us for help. So generally speaking, I’d say yes, everyone has to expect to receive a warning letter, but of course there are things you can do. I think we also want to talk about that. So that everything maybe doesn’t happen. I wouldn’t say, and I’d also be the wrong person to say it doesn’t make sense to sell because the risk of warning letters is so high — you have to, it’s just an annoying topic, you have to deal with it, I’d say.
David: And you just said there are things you can do to reduce the risk of getting a warning letter — what would those be?
Tilmann: Now it gets a bit, sounds a bit like a commercial for my profession. There are very many lawyers in Germany. And what I, I mean, very clear advice for someone who runs an online shop, whether on eBay, on another marketplace or their own online shop, is that they need legal advice, and there are different ways to get that. There are institutions that offer that, but there are also good specialist lawyers for this area. Here are a few recommendations from me: if you as a seller have recently gone through a divorce or had to settle a traffic accident and therefore know a lawyer, then take that one — but just because they handled the divorce well or settled the traffic accident well doesn’t mean they also know how to set up a legal notice on eBay properly. I’d say you can of course go to Google and search for an internet law lawyer, that’s already good. So definitely look for people who specialize in this topic. But we at eBay also, because this topic matters to us and because we’re not allowed to advise merchants directly ourselves, brought a partner on board with Trusted Shops and spent quite a bit of money to buy a package from them so that sellers don’t have to buy it themselves. I don’t know whether I should go deeper into that now or build a bit more suspense.
David: You can go into a bit more detail. So, instead of the seller having to pay for it themselves, we covered the cost so the seller can benefit from our partner Trusted Shops. And what does the seller get there?
Tilmann: Exactly, it’s a bit like a commercial break, but what you get, you get for free. That’s actually okay for a commercial break, right? Sellers, you have to imagine it like this: there’s a basic set-up, like when you move into a new apartment, you need a few things right away, otherwise it’s really annoying, right? And you get this basic set-up through this Trusted Shops offer. So the most important thing you need is first of all a proper legal notice that says, Tilmann Kuhla, I live here and there, my email address and these things, or if I’m a company, the managing director, and then you need a withdrawal policy that explains under what conditions returns are possible, all highly formalized. You need terms and conditions that you can also add to eBay, and Trusted Shops has built a legal-text generator for that. It’s basically a front end where you enter your data and it generates these texts. And beyond that there are very specific questions. So if I think of you, Tino, and toys, there are of course regulations intended to protect children, for example things that must not be too small, or then there’s a symbol on them saying “dangerous for 0 to 3 years” or something like that. Trusted Shops also has a library there, where for example if I sell wine or textiles or toys or TVs, there are always special rules for many products. Welcome, thanks, EU. And Trusted Shops has a PDF for each product, and you can read exactly: what do I need to pay attention to for this product? It’s actually super practical and it’s free. And if you want to go beyond that, you can of course pay for some things too. But even with the free part you can already get pretty far. One more quick thing, I’ve already been talking for ages. Every eBay seller with a shop subscription can use this, so from the smallest shop it’s included, so to speak. We’ll also be able to link it here in the show notes, as they say, and there’s an instruction on how to claim it.
Isabell: We’ve now talked about some things we can do preventively as merchants, including the Trusted Shops program. What can you recommend if it does happen after all?
Tilmann: Yes, I hinted a bit earlier in jest that someone sends you a form with it, very simple, even your own name is already pre-printed, and here in Germany we’re all wonderfully trained: if my name is written somewhere, I just sign it. Yes, please don’t. So the advice is basically the same as before. Definitely get legal help, and by no means sign the pre-formulated cease-and-desist declaration. Exactly because of the problem I just described. First we need to look at what the violation actually is. Can I prevent the violation in future? Then of course you mustn’t send it back before you’ve fixed the violation. So if I say yes, I solemnly promise, on payment of a contractual penalty if I do it again, always state the base price, and I haven’t even corrected it yet, then at that moment I’m immediately violating the cease-and-desist declaration. That means you need legal help, from a lawyer or also from Trusted Shops or a similar institution that knows this stuff well. So again, please don’t ask an eye doctor to fix your knee, i.e. don’t ask the divorce lawyer whether they can help with internet law. The lawyers will of course say yes, because they can make money from it, maybe, but they still may not actually be able to do it.
Tino: Thank you very much, Tilmann, for being able to tell us such exciting things here about warning letters. I’ve also learned a bit for myself about TV licence bills and reminders, but that’s a different topic. We’ll talk about that another time. Maybe not here, on the podcast. But right at the end, we always ask our guests one last question, and of course we’ll ask you that today too, and that question would be: what was the last thing you bought on eBay?
Tilmann: Well, I was already able to prepare a bit for the question because I heard that you asked Steven the same one, so the last thing I bought was last weekend, namely 5 Ninjago trading cards for my son, who had very specific ideas about which cards were still missing, and the classic case: if you can’t find it anywhere, you’ll probably find it on eBay. We were able to choose the cards very precisely, and then I was absolutely delighted to discover at the end of the order that, luckily, they were all from the same seller, because that meant we got a big shipping discount and child happy, dad happy, all good.
Isabell: Yes, very nice, Tilmann. I always find it exciting to see the different things our guests find on eBay. Well, that’s it from us for this week, and we hope our listeners were able to take away as much as we did today, and the next episode of our podcast will be in 2 weeks as usual.
David: We’re of course also very happy to receive your feedback on our podcast — as always, feel free to leave a comment in the community. About your experiences, have you ever received a warning letter? How did you react? Or if you still have questions, we’ll be happy to pass them on to Tilmann and the team. As eBay, we obviously can’t solve questions about your legal issues, nor are we allowed to, so please, as Tilmann has said very often, contact your own legal counsel and otherwise feel free to leave us a like or a subscription wherever you’re listening to us, if possible, and until next time.
Isabell: Thanks, Tilmann, for taking the time for us today, and then I’ll say goodbye!
Tilmann: My pleasure.
By
12 comments
johannesjonathan2012
·4 months agoyeah, that's true, although the question keeps coming to mind again and again: "Is man good or evil? Or can he be brought up to be good". I think, unfortunately, there are more and more bad apples, I think if Ebay can't manage to protect both sides, and as a buyer and seller you get the feeling of being ripped off. Because once it's the case that the seller rips you off and somehow that works completely legitimately, and another time it's a buyer and the result is the same. Some buyers and sellers probably know the internal tricks for always coming out on top, so not the short end of the stick, maybe Ebay employees, the suspicion keeps growing in my mind. It's somehow getting less and less fun, more and more scammers are hanging around on the platform and Ebay doesn't seem to care.
katbra0
·11 months agoI sell on eBay as a business and was warned by another eBay seller who also sells commercially. He sells shoes and cosmetics. He is issuing me a warning because I supposedly sell perfume, which he supposedly also sells, and because I allegedly listed incorrect ingredients here. But my item is not perfume, it is pheromones, and he does not have this at all in his eBay shop. The warning is not legitimate because you have to be selling the same thing if you want to issue a warning. Luckily, I am a member of Händlerbund, and they are now taking care of my case. I asked eBay why eBay sellers can slander other eBay sellers; that just does not work, these sellers have to be excluded from eBay. The lawyer from Händlerbund told me they do this because business is going badly, and then they come up with this meanness and badmouth others, and according to Händlerbund this is happening more and more often. What kind of people are these, absolutely disgusting
proreture
·2 years agoThe post was a while ago, but I'm happy to reply. The argument that you don’t count as advertising as a private individual doesn’t convince me either. Because even then, the private seller has a competitive advantage thanks to the savings on fees. And especially when it comes to a lot of items, you’re not just slipping into the commercial sphere, you’re operating in the commercial sphere and therefore competing.
We too have made it our task to consistently issue warnings to private sellers offering items that fall within our range. No one has anything against healthy competition on equal footing. But we are so kind as to point out in the first letter that they should stop these activities or register as a business. If they sell again in the next three days, they will receive a formal warning, at their expense through a lawyer. And it works; after about 50 notices sent and the corresponding warnings, things are slowly calming down. Word seems to be getting around.
johannesjonathan2012
·2 years agoWell, if you're only selling your private collection, with Lego pieces that can easily cover quite a lot of listings, you quickly fall into the category of commercial, unfortunately. At the flea market behind the house or by the station, no one asks about that; here you have to sell your collection in the shortest possible time or as a complete set for thousands of euros, nobody buys it.
As I said, without advertising the listings, I tried, I don't sell anything at all; if I advertise them, I pay just as much as a business seller. In the end, that's not quite right with competition law.
543-dabei-de
·2 years agojohannesjonathan2012 - I don't agree with you there. It's not about smashing heads in, it's about competition. And competition is clearly regulated; anyone who breaks the rules and gains an advantage has to take the risk of getting slapped down. That's a good thing too, the competitive advantage for obviously supposedly private sellers is after all 12 % lower fees.
According to current internal eBay figures, the private selling - for free - program has already paid off, since many new private sellers also buy more, allegedly 29 % more according to eBay. I've got nothing against that. But I do have a problem when a Tupperware lady is sitting on a cellar full of new plastic bowls and is now cheerfully selling them privately in huge quantities. That's the difference.
johannesjonathan2012
·3 years agoIf private and commercial sellers keep beating each other over the head, it won’t do anyone any good in the end. The fact is, despite 0 percent listing fees, the listing won’t be found if you don’t advertise it. And that also means fees for every private seller.
The problem, as before, is that the lawyers specialize in making a profit from "find the mistake." For private sellers just as much as for commercial sellers.
The bigger problem is that if, sooner or later, all private sellers (who are always also potential buyers) disappear from here, then it will no longer be worthwhile for commercial sellers to even offer anything here. That means, de facto, if you keep reporting each other, you are digging your own graves.
543-dabei-de
·3 years agoI’m a commercial eBay seller myself, have been since before eBay existed, so I’ve had an account since 1/4/1999 - there are no older accounts on eBay. I’ve already received at least 50 cease-and-desist letters, some justified, some not. I’ve always sent Mr. Sandhage back to Berlin - but over the last 20 years I still paid around 10,000 euros because of my own dumb mistakes or things you just can’t know (e.g. protected terms like AUTOPYJAMA or BIOTENSOR )
BUT: now I’m also sending cease-and-desist letters myself to private sellers who are clearly poaching in my segment, who are obviously selling mass amounts of new goods and, thanks to their private-seller status since early 03/2023, are just brazenly 10% cheaper because of the funny eBay private-seller fees - 0% rule. And this will keep escalating, not just from me. The tax office will finally step in too, hopefully. Nothing against funny liquidation sales, but sham-commercial selling on eBay is simply a NO GO for commercial sellers like me because of the fee advantage. I suspect that’s fully intentional on eBay’s part.... Go ahead and clear our marketplace with your cease-and-desist letters and your court-cost risk. Actually a brilliant plan... but it will backfire, and then eBay will have the **ouch** card because what is supposed to be achieved through the fee exemption for private sellers will backfire, since they - if they really are not within the narrow limits of private selling - either have to be reported to the tax office BY EBAY and/or can be lawfully sent a cease-and-desist letter. End of run-on sentence
turbohamster
·4 years agoThe warning-letter protection with Trusted Shops is only for the eBay Shop subscription, unfortunately. I don't have a shop subscription, but as an eBay seller I would like to take advantage of this warning-letter protection.
podcast@ebay
Hello @schaukaestchen, do you mean this link: https://verkaeuferportal.ebay.de/verkaeuferstandards/abmahnschutz
It’s all the way at the bottom of the description, unfortunately it isn’t immediately recognizable as a link.
Best regards,
The podcast team
bents-it
·4 years agoHello,
what's the situation with the known technical error where, on eBay, legal texts and the legal notice are sometimes not displayed? Does eBay support the seller here, since there have already been several cease-and-desist letters because of the error?
schaukaestchen
·4 years agoWhere is the announced link to the Trusted Shops explanations or extensions?
havassgmbh
·4 years agoIt's just a shame that there are dealers on eBay who issue cease-and-desist letters to private sellers!!
I’ve already got my second one now, even though I’m only selling old items, some of them new but unused.
One of the dealers doesn’t even sell here; he only has an account for buying.
The other deals in watches and is sending me a cease-and-desist because I’m selling 2 pairs of earrings for 1.20 that have been listed since 2018 because we can’t tolerate costume jewelry anymore.
Back then, people used to see and buy lots of nice things, also for the kids, and now can’t use them anymore.
That was actually what eBay was meant for, but these dealers are taking advantage of it to make money like this