Sorry for misunderstood perceived violation of TOS !

[Ave]

For years I have worked on developing my own website to handle what I do online all by trial and error.

Everything on my site I created manually.
I had no checkout system for selling so also sold on other websites and began using my site to promote my stores and other sites. I even share with other artists to use to promote their auctions & shops and other online sites.

When I attempted to sell from my site I predominantly had to create many individual paypal buttons for each item I was selling usually my art but last year I began buying jewelry to resell. Listing the jewelry was proving to take too long on my site so I began looing for a new venue rather than continue making the listings there, I left what was there already where it was, but opened an ebid store and from that point on began listing on ebid - shifting from actually selling on my site and pointing my site visitors to my new ebid store for shopping.

The work in editing got to be so much its been talking me hundreds of hours to accomplish and is very exhausting, so I left what was already on my site, which by the way only had a few sales over its entire course of time and so I began setting up my store here so i would no longer have to keep making paypal buttons and have so much editing to do as my site is basically a social site anyway and not designed for ecommerce. I put a tab on my site to send customers here to my new ebid store,

I left what already was there and on new promo uploaded pictures there I began posting direct links to my ebid auctions that match the items I was showing there to send customers to ebid,

I use the gallery function of my site to post pics of items I have for sale and I use the description boxes there to paste links where the items can be purchased. By using the gallery there my items get posted to facebook twitter and other sites as a hub for promotions.

My hope was by the time I finished getting every new item listed here in my stores that i would use my site solely for promo and not sales as I had not made any more paypal buttons since I began using ebid. There are still however old paypal buttons still there from things listed before I made my ebid store. Its been a process that takes alot of time to convert. Ultimately i wanted the ebid store to be my main site and eventually would close down other sites and just keep my ebid store as I planned on consolidation to free up my time as I currently have to spend more than 100 hours a week mostly editing and writing on alot of sites and promoting my ebid thru them all.

So far I got about 850 items listed since around last September . I set my store up with about 50 categories and subcategories and had all my auctions in their proper category. For me that took alot of time as I dont know how to use the bulk uploaders but instead used copy and paste as I individually created every auction I have here.

You must know how tedious and time consuming it is to do it the way I have been but i am self taught and fumbling my way along and learning as I go. I dont have Microsoft Office any more, as it was on my old computer, given to me by my daughter, but couldnt transfer it to my new computer plus I never really knew how to use it. I see it was needed to use your bulk uploader so I downloaded the alternate one recommended - the Open Office org software - but on the bulk upload page it says to use "Calc" on Open Office.
I dont know where to find it on that new software as perhaps its been updated and has a new name or something but realized I dont know how that would help me to do bulk uploading of auctions here .Not sure what I downloaded from that link as I dont see anything saying "Calc". So I am back to individually loading.

I had a fairly well organized store with over 800 items listed - categorizing not just an item by what it was but also by its type and materials and had over 50 various categories and subcatgegories to list in. All was very time consuming as I worked day and night for months figuring it all out and getting them listed.

Meanwhile I havent bee on my website much except to do promotions of my ebid auctions and putting direct links on those images to my ebid auctions already listed so any potential customer would have to go to my ebid auction to complete the sale.
I had one member of my website use those links and actually came here bought 9 items from ebid from my listings.So far she was 1 of my only 2 customers in the passed 6 months.

While my ebid stores are my new method to selling online and I also placed a tab on top of my webpage to send customers to my ebid store, I still had my old edits there that were there from before I opened my ebid stores.
Doing everything manually, I was focusing on new listings and leaving old ones alone so i can keep listing but got tired and have not done as much online since Christmas as its been easier to just leave the old things as they proved to not get me customers anyway and I was using my new way to direct people to my ebid store and its dedicated checkout system.

Well on my ebid auctions, I had made a template to copy and paste from one auction to the next any info that would be pertinent to all and put specific info into my file names to make it a little quicker to list individually.

The copy and paste template provided most of my info for my ebid store items and my promo site. It was not unlike what I have seen often on ebay where I used to do alot of selling and have 100% positive feedback at.

I stated right in my links that if a customer saw something at my site [ thru my slideshows & profile page] that if a customer didnt see what they wanted in my ebid store but instead saw something on my site, that they should simply contact me and I would then list that item on ebid for them to purchase. I also have lots of items on my site with no paypal buttons at all as doing it that was was always very time consuming and not an effective way to sell.

In no way was I ever intending to be redirecting potential customers to buy away from ebid to my website.

If anything the opposite would be true as I was using my website to bring people to Ebid.

My site however works well as a promo hub linking me to all my social sites, facebook, linkedin ,twitter blogs , ebid facebook pages and more.

Redirecting my sites to guide people to my ebid store has been the overall goal.

It was my hope that once I can finally get all my items listed here that I can eventually consolidate all my sites and post solely on ebid which is why I bought the lifetime membership.

When I linked in my websites and my slideshows for ebid promotional purposes, it was never intended to be breaking any rules here nor was I using it to divert potential customers away from ebid.

The intention was actually the very opposite. My website even has direct tab link to take people from my website direct to my ebid stores~! I also encourage other artists and crafters to join ebid and open stores as well.

I even read the TOS but felt to my understanding I was not like some of those sales companies seen online that use ebay or ebid to do such redirects to circumvent sale fees. I do enough online buying to see that is a practice others use but though mine may have appeared to be on a similar track I assure you it was not like those~!

Still I made a mistake - Apparently the way I created my templates for my ebid auctions, that some of my info links gave such an appearance and has caused concern an my auctions have since been placed on 'hold' and my stores were emptied and closed down.
and I received an email that I was in violation of the TOS.

Initially confused as to whether it was due to drop shipping or if it was a violation for something else, I reviewed it and see the links as the potential reason for how ebid could have mistook my profile page as a source of conflict and potential TOS violation,

I am trying to fix it all now. i never wanted to violate anything and for that I am sorry,

Now I have also lost months of editing work as well - one click and I lost all my auctions~!! They are not easily restorable~! None will go back into my stores. I have now downsized the categories of my stores to be able to attempt to re-sort them but there doesnt seem to be any speedy way to redo my stores and I dont have the energy to spend another 4 months posting them or editing them back into their proper categories, I have now removed most of my subcategories and am trying to see what is the best way to proceed - to repost all my cut auctions and leave them out of the store and just make new auctions for the stores OR do i risk if I reload my old auctions that one or more that would still have my website links would cause this to be all deleted again and fear relisting as I can not afford the time to put so much work and effort into this to come back and find it all deleted~!!

While I do understand your concerns about the listing you considered a violation, why couldnt that my listings have been held in a way I could have bulk edited without them losing their sorted positions in my store? Even had there been a way to instead of deleting the listing to have deleted their descriptions. At least that way the time needed to correct the descriptions to be in compliance wouldnt have caused the loss of months and months of labor.

Its all very frustrating to come and work for months here listing and then come back and see all my work gone.Although I can understand your considering I was in violation I hadnt considered that I was, so it was a matter of interpretation of your rules that was misunderstood and the consequences in this case seem a bit severe and is a very big setback and cost me alot of valuable time and effort in vain and to miss any potential Valentines Day sales as well.

Being that most customers are not from the US as the venue still needs more promotion with ebay being the one most buyers are familar with I am not sure that even if I began reposting all my auctions here if there would be even one sale as I had NO Christmas sales here whatsoever.

With all the work I did here listing so many auctions since last Sept I had only 2 customers - 1 from Germany that i ended up refunding part of the shipping on and the other from my website that came here thru the links on my site and bought 9 items total here. .

I am in very poor health and everything takes alot of effort and now I dont see spending 100s and 100s of hours listing and promoting that yielded only 2 customers as a complete waste of time and effort cponsidering someone clicked a button and killed my store and so I might have to just walk a way a while and watch TV.
My arms ache from typing.This has been upsetting. I never meant to violate anything and didnt see what I did as a violation but now understand how it was considered one and have no intentions of including any info that could ever be considered a violation again.

On the flip side now, is there is any easier way to list into the stores and auctions to correct this situation and restore my old listings to be in my store in their categories without having to do each one individually? I dont think redoing 850 auctions one at a time as something to do as that could take weeks to accomplish.

I wish someone could show me how to do it more effectively.My internet connection is slow. living in the country, so each auction takes about 15 minutes to edit over. and slow to load the next ones.

Really has me almost ready to give up entirely and maybe go back to ebay. They never deleted any of my auctions.


Ave

[JanetB]

I think maybe one of the reasons your listings may have been deleted is because of your ecommerce link in your images. As far as I am aware, that is against eBid policy - someone will come along and correct me if I'm wrong.

[gazza]

Hi Ave,

If you log in to your account it should explain the reasons behind the removal of your listings.

Once you agree to follow the T&C you should have access to your listings in the Listings I Ran section of My eBid.

You can relist them from there, however you would need to fix the listing description field to remove the offending links. This could be done via My Bulk Edit (ensure you remove the exact matching HTML) ... or ... export your listings and remove the offending code in a text editor with search and replace, then you can re-upload them via My eBid > My Bulk Upload.

I would probably go the export route, should take no more than 2 minutes to do.

Thanks,
Gazza

[Ave]

Hi Gazza,

I guess it was a case of me shooting myself in the foot - since I have a social site but have been trying to turn it into an ecommerce although it never quite made it, as I never had anything automated on the site and did every thing manually which was one of the reasons I finally gave up on doing it one at a time there because I also had to make the buttons and set up a page for each item and then add them to an index and well by the time each item would be what I called 'processed' where it would show up in an album I called a gallery and then be ready to sell, the process was tedious and very time consuming. When items can be part of a program where you just have to add its file name & pic and it goes to all the related places automatically thats a heck of a lot faster and easier.
I never got done doing it with my items at my site andoften confused myself as one spot I could end up with pics that were disconnected from everytthing else, another spot I could have a picture with a paypal button done but not listed in the index - Other spots I would have things in the index but no paypal buttoms made and so on.. It got so only rarely a person would write me about wanting something and I would have to go make up an invoice as it was too hard to use the site to check out.
My site was and is better for promotion and doing multi ads but with using for the sales part it proved to be too hard as it never had a dedicated checkout system.
Still for the ones I had gotten 'done', I just left them with outside chance someday to finish processing them.,
Due to that amount of work and how I now get confused as to where I left off last, decided it would save so much time to just have a store and then put a link to the store on my site so that eveythinbg would go into my ebid store and then automatically be ready for sale.
Nowadays with the twitter , facebook & pinterest buttons on ebid that also helps with quick little promos as well.,

Using my site I would write a page like an ad and then copy and paste it to all the other promo sites with links to that page on other sites where i could only link them like twitter. I found they got more visitors that way. I noticed on ebid when I was active years ago that unless you self promote your ifems its unlikely to sell at all as i could visit a post and see little or no hits, which has been a big part of the problem of selling online - getting visits or hits and getting known elsewhere - so posting links all over tends to help get more viewers to the auction page in the end.

Now I am scared to list. I know just putting the item name and picture for an auction will not get hits or visitors and could sit there in never-never-internet-land indefinitely BUT if I link it into places where I actually do get traffic already and has actually brought people to ,my ebid store and did actually generate 9 sales for me that the lady was a member of my other sites but seeing the presentation thu the links on my site to ebid, came here and bought up 9 items.,

She could have just as easily wrote me I suppose and I could have made her an invoice BUT she likes to shop at venues that look like real shopping venues SO she clicked my ebid tab at my site and came to my ebid, browsed and bid~!

Thats kind of the way it should be too.
Now since her purchases, I have had no other customers here. I have kind of taken some time off after Christmas and havent been pushing as hard as I was before either. Ihoped once I got ALL my stuff listed that I could then simply focus on promo and linking and get sales as I planned on keeping all items up til sold.

I wanted to get the ebid store established and known. Unfortunately the way the plug has since been pulled out , even with a lifetime membership, I am now very hesitant since depending on ebid to handle all my future sales and seeing how easily ebid pulls the plug on a tremendous amount of work - well it leaves me with an inability to trust ebid at this point.

I will have to wait til I can figure out a blanket way of perhaps selling 100 rings or 100 whatevers~ at the same price that would have the same descriptions and just have to change the pictures, so t hat the listing part woulndt take so much of my time.as it is very valuable to me.

Sure I can understand ebid's desire and right to self preserve, however it surfacely appeared I was in violation when in reality I was in transition going from one way of selling to another. I can not rectify that loss of work however and think this is perhaps the tip of the iceberg in selling here since your buying audience is mostly non US, there are additional issues at hand that make it more difficult to sell at. While I could offer low or discounts in US domestic shipping, it cant do as much for foreign and most of your market seems to be foreign.

I think American sellers are slowly becoming aware that while ebid is cheap and allows more to dos than ebay, that ebid cant offer the buying audience ebay has.
I further think that the way I was doing it would have been a way to actually have made ebid better in the long run and the way I set up my website, other ebid sellers were invited to join and use the same promo tools I was developing and those ways were free and are.

I have a model for other sites like etsy and toplists that when used with sales and auctions have proven to help increase traffic.

To simply list here and only click the twitter and facebook and do nothng else has shown me no sales as well.

So while I will strive to abide by the current rules, I wish ebid would see new ways to advertise as not being such a threat to them which was really in the end is all I did was to advertise my items here and elsewhere.
.

[Ave]

Hi Jan,
Yes I think that is how ebid perceived it and acted upon it that way.
Seeing it that way I can understand their actions, however when I did initially read the rules and was aware of that as a rule i was not really trying to use ebid to increase my perceived e-commerce site since my site is actually a social site that I had been trying to turn into an e-commerce and was in transition to using ebid instead of my other methods.
Had my site included a checkout system for everything I never would have needed another source, For the last several years I had veered away from ebay and began selling on store sites and most of those also yielded little sales if any.
Because of that I attempted to make paypal buttons per item and add to my site but that proved to take too much time and I would often confuse myself as to where I left off in listing.
I have lots of dead links on my site from previous attempts at methods to sell that I either gave up on or changed to a different way.
Eventually I stuck to blogs and facebook groups and pages and began cross promotions to generate traffic and that helped some but was taking me more than 100 hours a week to do the cross promotions.
Meanwhile I had members there that were following my example and they too were promoting using my site as a hub for their traffic so when a potential customer was viewing their art for example would look at their profile and see all t he stores or auction locations and then select one to buy at . That generated absolutely no income for me what so ever but did help my members make some sales.

When I began buying up jewelry last year to start selling online again and steer away from trying to list them all on my site, I saw that ebid had finally gotten a bit more together than it was 7 yrs ago and thought to give it another try as I have been a member here for years but hardly came back here since the first year since I only had a few sales back then.

I had hoped that by now adding my ebid store into the top section tabs of my website, since my website has had over 70K unique visitors that if I put all my time into building an ebid store that it would actually get enough traffic to generate sales.,

The whole process however has been a transition from one way of frantically promoting and selling into going into a more stable way of selling by sending all customers to one location- my ebid store - and then once all my items were to have been listed here - I could then collapse out the old incomplete listings on my website.

Now its seeing some of the incomplete listings I had there that were the basis for placing my account on hold here. That itself I do understand and hoped once I was made aware of it that I could bulk edit my items here and remove my profile link,

Sounded simple til I attempted and thats when I found that nothing was going to go back into the store so that all t hat sorting and sub category work I did was lost forever and that is what has shaken me as that particular aspect of the work done is what can not be retrieved and has cost me months of labor that I can not afford months again to repeat.

I have nearly 3000 items to sell, After 4-5 months of labor I had only gotten 850 listings completed. Perhaps because I am getting old and dont have the technical saavy side of the internet down pat, but mostly fumble and try different things til they work, The way I was getting traffic worked but was very time consuming.

Now back to zero- asking myself if I want to spend another 4 months redoing everytbjng that was previously done or to give up. I feel defeated , exhausted and think that more consideration should be given before ebid pulls the plug on someone., I think had they checked further they would have found that my site was not a company or even well organized enougn to present any threat to ebid whatsoever.

had it been a software program store that was using auction sites to suck up customers, sure I could understand that as you can find them here and on ebay and somehow they always get away with it but I feel at best I was a small fish they harpooned with a whale gun. I also wonder if perhaps it was by some complaint by a competitor that may have laid our a complaint to ebid wrongly making them think I was such when I was not and was actually transitioning, using the tools I already understood and had developed my site to promote ebid as much as my ebid store.

I am kind of stumped at starting over, not sure that even if I reactivate my auctions, as they were , that there may or may not be other descriptions on those that would again cause the same issue to arise and if I were to carefully word my new auctions leaving out all connections to my site that any of my 850 previous auctions if re-posted as it says I can do now, would once again cause them all to be deleted.

I took this opportunity to cull out my store categories so they would be a little easier to re-list in but no matter how I approach the matter now, I an looking at months work to do with dismal prospects of sales anyway.

Disheartening is an understatement.

[Ave]

Hi Ave,

If you log in to your account it should explain the reasons behind the removal of your listings.

Once you agree to follow the T&C you should have access to your listings in the Listings I Ran section of My eBid.

You can relist them from there, however you would need to fix the listing description field to remove the offending links. This could be done via My Bulk Edit (ensure you remove the exact matching HTML) ... or ... export your listings and remove the offending code in a text editor with search and replace, then you can re-upload them via My eBid > My Bulk Upload.

I would probably go the export route, should take no more than 2 minutes to do.

Thanks,
Gazza

Hi Gazza,

Well there is a saying that you cant teach an old dog new tricks which somewhat applies to me.Ever since I began selling online or attempting to sell online, I can fumble and find some ways that look like other ways but have failed to find any one way that eliminates those tedious edits,

I did re-read the rules and made a new template leaving out my website address but then when I tried to bulk edit it wouldnt show there so couldnt use it,

I then went to the bulk list and downloaded open office and initially couldnt find that Calc but once I finally did saw a big grid and put in my first item picture but it took up a bunch of spaces and so didnt know what to do with it so deleted that as I was uncertain how to do it so it would work for posting here.

I then went to my store and decided instead of all the sub categories I had there to make shopping easier for customers with items already that had been in each of those categories such as all white gold rings or all rose gold rings or all size 6 rings or all cubic zirconia rings and so on to eliminate them all and just go by ring sizes alone as sorting over again will take weeks or months to do otherwise.

I also changed all my assortments for necklaces as I have many styles and types from solitaires to pendants to chains to ropes to gemstones to handmade and then the different gemstones as I had them sorted by cubic zirconias, jade, jasper, turquoise , etc that I had numerous subcategories of necklaces, rings, earrings, bracelets and so on. So I thought well just make less categories to reset them to but that too will take weeks to edit and sort.

Then I thought to maybe relist with items of same price that it might go faster to relist but I have many different prices since I purchased every item I am selling individually and their pricing reflects a markup from what I purchased them at and so that method wont really work for me either.

Its left me in a confused bind. I did re-post the first 50 items from the auctions I have ran list but they didnt go back into my store and have to be open edited individually - again that will take a very long time to do - and as they currently stand I fear any one of them that still has the link to my profile could cause any new work I do to get me placed on hold and undo any work I do even from this point on.

For me its all a transition from many incomplete methods previously used to what I was hoping to be the new one way method which was to be my store. I went back over to my website and while most of my new picture gallery items include the ebid link to the items auction for those who would have been interested in purchasing, that now all those links which were manually added are dead now as well.that means for all the work I did here that was promoted there that now everything there has to be redone as well., I dont know how I am going to fix any of it in any efficient time frame.

The one good thing my site has was traffic. I have had over 70k unique visitors there and all the places I have posted links to my site at over the years does cause visitors to come there, What was helping me to get some traffic here at my store was the links I put there,,Now those visitors who do click a link there to come here will go to a dead store link x850

I wish I could grasp and understand how to make a zip file but never have made one and never have exported a file before so at this point my computer websites and store are all a mess.

Its my own fault for my own inexperience and in trying to do things the way I do and for me doing everything one item at a time has been the way I have done so since I got online several years ago and am aware there are better ways I just dont know how to do them those ways. Thats why it took me over 4 months just to get the 850 items listed here. Someone that knows what they are doing could do it all in a few minutes, but unfortunately for me, I am not one of those who is capable of that.

I fumble my way around until I find a copy and paste way to do something and then still do it all one at at time. Living in the country, my internet connection is only about 5MB on a good day so doing each listing takes longer than if I lived in the city and did them. I opted for the best service and bought a new faster computer but the cable lines out here are slow no matter how good a computer is and the service is poor at best which only complicates and caused editing to take so much longer too. its just more obstacles I keep trying to overcome.,

I had felt by Christmas that only getting to 850 items listed in 4 months time was poor at best but had hoped once they all were up there that I could clean up my site and was going to trim it so all sales would have had to go thru ebid. I think I will have to again attempt but meanwhile will have to cull out alot of my site to make it appear in compliance with ebid before listing new ebid items.

ArtRave is a promotional artists network and is meant simply to generate traffic to sales locations.It handles my online art jewelry and print sites. but the only items that can be purchased there are the ones on the individually made paypal buttons and so many of them are dead links they do need to be deleted anyway but again there they have to be done one at a time as well.


So I guess I will be away a while from here as I now have so many dead ebid links there to have to delete and while at it for any that have old paypal buttons will delete them too and once I trim there will come back and try to build my store again, but its going to take a long time to be able to do.

[Ave]

Well needing to get restarted somewhere - so re-editing the first 50 and since I simplified store categories am going to tackle the 50 and then figure from how long that takes to whether or not to work on the other 800 or just make new uniform auctions and average them all out.
I keep trying to get away from endless editing but guess its unavoidable - just have to learn how to do it faster.
Probably wont get done before its time to leave it all to my kids, lol, as borrowed time is borrowed time but maybe get it set so they can continue selling my things when I can not and maybe even have it set up less confusing by then..
Setbacks happen in all walks of life and this was just another one.Just need to figure a better way to streamline things.