eBay confirm: “Yes you can sell Amazon items”
Following on from yesterday’s post about DS Domination and dropshipping,
Looking forward I guess there’s little left to do but adopt a wait and see approach. As far as Amazon goes, short of policing eBay themselves and trying to connect listings to Amazon accounts (which I don’t realistically see them doing), it would seem the ball is entirely in eBay’s court.
I sent an email to eBay to try to get to the bottom of whether or not they are officially fine with sellers, members of DS Domination or otherwise, selling Amazon products on their site.
I was kind of expecting a “refer to our terms and conditions” type vague reply but to my surprise, I was contacted by an eBay Customer Service rep who was quite clear on the issue.
Before we get into eBay’s reply though, just for clarification here is the message I initially sent them yesterday:
Hi there, I was wondering what eBay’s policy is on me listing Amazon items on eBay?
I’d list items I haven’t purchased yet from Amazon and if they sell, purchase the item and then have Amazon ship the item to the eBay customer. Am I able to do this as an eBay seller?
As you can see I was very specific and blunt, wanting crystal clear clarification on whether or not I can list Amazon items I haven’t yet bought, with an intention to purchase only after the listing sells on eBay.
Here’s what eBay sent back:
Thanks for contacting eBay Customer Service. I’m happy to ehar (sic) that you are interested in selling items here in our site! I undersntad (sic) that you have some questions about selling Amazon items. Let me help you.
To answer your question, yes you can. But it is not advisable to sell items if you do not physically have the item. There could be some problems along the way with regard to the shipping part and some damages during shipment.
Sellers who choose to sell using this method are still responsible for the item and the buyer’s satisfaction. It is allowed as long as long as the seller can guarantee that the item will be delivered to the buyer within 30 days of the end of the listing.
Sellers who choose to sell using this method are responsible for the item and their buyer’s satisfaction just like any other eBay seller. If there is a problem, it’s the seller’s responsibility to work it out with the buyer.
I hope this information helps.
And there you have it. With the caveat of an item being shipped within 30 days of purpose, eBay will only go so far as to advise sellers not to sell items they don’t physically have.
This should put any questions of whether or not eBay have problems with the sale of Amazon products through eBay to rest once and for all.
Why DS Domination themselves haven’t contacted eBay in an official capacity and sought a response as such I can’t say, but I’d strongly advise they do to avoid and further confusion going forward.
That and informing their members that they risk eBay seller account suspension if their training is not 100% followed wouldn’t hurt either.
Meanwhile why ProfessorX’s account was banned remains a mystery. Was it the product categories listed? Was it the listing titles? Was it the amount of listings?
Unfortunately without specific clarification from eBay on the matter we may never know. And by all accounts, clarification on eBay seller account suspensions isn’t one of eBay’s strong suits.
In anycase, at least at a core level I hope the above response form eBay offers some official clarification to DS Domination members as to whether or not they can safely list Amazon items on eBay.
Note that I’ve sent a similar question to Amazon as I did eBay, but at the time of publication have not yet received a response.
ProfessorX is a TelexFree member, a “group leader” or something. He first appeared in the TelexFree thread in the MMG forum around September 25, post #1007.
Link disabled:
moneymakergroup.com/Telexfree-Telexfreeco-t415036.html&st=1005
He will typically present his own version of the realities, e.g. modify his own role from “participant” to “someone not involved in the opportunity, only helping some friends”.
He also used exaggerated descriptions when he tried to minimize the payment problems, e.g. “absolutely NO problem” rather than giving a correct description of it. He rceived a comment about it too, “you’re the first one using exaggerated descriptions”.
It was later revealed that he worked with a group of people and tried to protect their interests. That was revealed when he made a stupid comment, something about “missing this great opportunity”. He was confronted with his initial role of “someone not involved himself, only helping some friends”, i.e. people pointed out that he had missed the opportunity himself. He got very pissed off when he was confronted with his initial role.
That story doesn’t tell anything about the new situation, it only shows that he has used modified versions of the reality earlier. People can have rational reasons for doing that, e.g. there can be completely rational motives for not wanting to tell the world about involvment in an opportunity.
But it can also be some type of “habit”. Or it can be completely rational explanations for it. I’m unable to identify WHAT it is, the information available is too vague to draw any conclusions.
Are we talking about the same ProfX here? It’s a pretty common handle based on a well-known comic book character.
Drop shipping from Amazon or other retail sites through Ebay has been going on for years. DSD just took it a step further and put a training system behind it (which has been done before also by other marketers) and an affiliate plan to sell the training.
So no Ebay doesn’t care as long as all rules are followed – It’s a huge new line of sellers for them!
Becoming a seller on Ebay weather drop shipping or otherwise you need to read and understand Ebays rules and policies – (Don’t depend on somebody else to teach you that part as it is your business after all) DSD makes no money what so ever from the sales you produce on Ebay.
Unlike most typical MLM’s or affilaite opportunities providing a product and they get a cut of your sales.
I can answer the Amazon question for you also – No they do not particularly like the whole Ebay / Amazon connection because Ebay is a competitor.
However once I buy a product from Amazon what I do with it (Shipping it to other addresses besides my own) is my business as long as Amazon get’s paid accordingly for there services.
If you use Amazon “Prime” they will and have shut that down on some accounts as it’s intended for the personal consumer and not the bigger quantity sales of a re-seller / drop shipper. No big deal – Go open a new account.
Happy Selling!
Post #1007 in the TelexFree thread:
Joined: 20-May 13
Member No.: 514,053
He acted relatively rationally in that thread, i.e. you can’t put too much notice on that type of vague information. I tried to balance the information by telling that it was too vague for any conclusions.
He used exaggerated descriptions when he tried to minimize a problem, but rational people can do that as a part of their “communication style”.
He acted in a specific role, but most people do that on the internet. So he acted quite normally, well within the range for what most people do (it isn’t THAT uncommon to meet people acting as “MLM experts” or any other role).
He got pissed off when he was confronted with his initial role, i.e. when there were mismatches between the role he claimed to have and his statements. But people will often react like that. That doesn’t make the behavior become irrational in itself (but very exaggerated reactions could have indicated “something”).
Oz, I responded in the previous message about this quite a bit, but DSD already DID talk with eBay about this a LOT.
Roger used to have his own assigned agent at eBay due to the volume he was processing as he talks about frequently. I’ve personally been doing this for over 2 years and never had any issues with eBay at all, and I’ve told them straight up that I’m using Amazon and ___ and ___ as the suppliers.
DSD has published official responses in their site, to their members, and also sent a response to one of the people from MMG who also posted it in the forum. And this has been posted since the beginning, not something they just stated now.
Oh well, at least you can correct the previous message and the review 🙂
I’m still waiting on a response from Amazon. They sent me back some whack can response about not having an Amazon seller account. You need to have an Amazon seller account to ask about using Amazon to supply eBay listings?
I sent them another email under a different category. I could have sworn the original category I sent it under had nothing to do with selling on Amazon so no idea how it wound up with that dept.
I’d suggest DS Domination put up a FAQ about this on their website (not in the backoffice). It’s not likely a question that’s going to away any time soon.
I can’t help thinking that you’re slightly barking up the wrong tree with this one Oz.
Buying stuff on Amazon to sell on ebay, may well be risky, even stupid, but it doesn’t seem to be a breach of ebay’s terms. I’m not clear whether it’s an enforceable breach of Amazon’s terms (or even a breach at all). When you buy something (say from Amazon), in almost all cases you are allowed to sell it on – and a retailer could be entering a legal minefield if they tried to stop you doing that using the law.
I suppose amazon could argue that it’s a breach of the prime membership, and it may well be, but if they were concerned about that, amazon could simply refuse the sale – or terminate the prime membership. Why they would want to do that, I don’t know – Amazon are presumably making money on each of these items purchased, regardless of who ends up receiving it.
(FWIW: If Amazon & ebay see a lot of money being made by this model – and they both presumably have an almost exact figure for sales made this way – they could simply do the whole process automatically using software, and keep all the money for themselves, without any of this tedious copying and pasting of product descriptions, or multi-level compensation plans)
In any case, while I agree with you there are many reasons to doubt about whether this idea of buy on amazon sell on ebay is a sustainable business model, or one to be encouraged, I think there better questions to ask of DS Domination, like the compensation, the distributor/retail customer ratio, whether distributors are really using the product themselves, why anybody would pay monthly for the same training, etc., In short, whether it contains the same kind of problem issues that you have identified in dozens (hundreds?) of other programs.
I couldn’t help but to think about X-Men. Aww that made me laugh. I’m itching to know why he was band after hearing this update.
Amazon’s TOS for their Prime service explicitly forbids uses like DSD:
amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=13819201
As to why Amazon might object to the practice is fairly simple. If someone orders an item on EBay and it gets delivered as if it were a gift from an Amazon Prime member they might get curious enough to discover how over charged they just were.
Amazon isn’t responsible for the deception but their service was used in the transaction, they share in some customer dissatisfaction. I don’t think it would take much more than two complaints to get any one Amazon Prime account shut down.
Amazon does have a Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service where a merchant can use Amazon’s infrastructure as a legitimate drop shipper but from just a quick read of the program details it seems to involve the merchant getting their own products to one of Amazon’s warehouses as a starting point. Don’t think that fits into the DSD business model.
And what’s your point exactly? DSD specifically states that Amazon Prime TOS doesn’t allow for dropshipping – even to non-members that’s made clear.
I don’t think you know the difference between Amazon Prime (meant for personal use only) and Amazon in general.
Exactly the point I made earlier. DSD is one of the rare programs where majority of their income and membership is retail, not affiliate. Less than 30% of members are affiliates and only around 6-7% of the revenue comes from affiliates directly.
They get it right in a sea of deceptive pyramids and ponzis out there today!
As for the monthly cost – makes total sense, you are using their live training, their software for research, tracking, titling, and more. It only makes sense that DSD should be charging monthly for such extensive software solutions + updated training + weekly live training don’t you think?
The only ‘training-only’ parts of the system are not monthly costs at all.
Josh you are miscounting, or at the very least mixing up two different things into one combined set of numbers,
Sales that DSD members make on eBay, might be a kind of retail sales, but they are retail sales of electronics, books, luggage, etc – and they are definitely Not retail sales of DSD.
Retail sales of DSD are people buying DSD without the desire to recruit further people into DSD.
It is that ratio, Retail sales of DSD itself as compared to distributor sales of DSD that is the real question.
No you’re not understanding the point I made. The retail sales on eBay are NOT being counted in that figure. If we were to count that, the numbers would be INSANE.
Less than 1/3 of DSD members are also affiliates. For example, if there are 10,000 DSD members, only around 3k are affiliates. Is that clear now?
I know we’ve all come to expect pretty much everything to be a chain recruitment scheme with some made-up fake product to provide the ‘front’ for it, but that is not the case with DSD.
So just to recap, by ‘retail’ I mean NON-Affiliate DSD members.
Talk about a storm in a teacup! I don’t know why “Oz” got involved with this in the first place!
E Bay make sales – they are happy!
Amazon make sales – they are happy
The DS D member makes a profit – He’s happy
The customer who bought from E Bay got his product at a lesser price than he would have paid on Amazon – He/She is happy
So what’s the problem?
Keith
The one risk however is that people are going to figure out they could get the item at a reduced cost from Amazon and may refrain from checking ebay before Amazon in this case.
That should be a concern for ebay because less customers and more sellers dropshipping at slightly inflated costs means less ebay revenue, less activity, reduced approval, etc.
Then what good is DSD when when that begins to take effect?
Keith,
Could you please explain just how the end buyer purchases an item for less than he/she would have paid, had they bought it directly from Amazon themselves? Are you saying DSD members receive some soft of additional discount from Amazon?
Jerry
If possible if the buyer split a bit of the discount he got from Amazon affiliates AND Amazon VISA card by Chase.
Someone tried to make that into a shopping assistant webapp. Don’t know how well they worked out.
http://lifehacker.com/i-know-how-theyre-doing-it-they-joined-that-retailers-1533184092
I turned down a friend’s request to become an affiliate after reading your ds dom articles. She was very disappointed that the outcome of my research (which I posted online) did not align with hers.
I’m very curious to read Amazon’s response to your question.
Unfortunately they never got back to me.