Forum

Multiple Identicle Accounts
 

I've been checking out these boards a lot over the past few months and finally joined. I also bought the Amazon Ghost book and it seems extremely informative on the first pass through. There seems to be more important info here than anywhere else online, so anyway it's great!

But something I thought of today and thought I'd ask the members here. Would there be an issue in making a duplicate Ebay store with a second username but with slightly modified items (price, shipping, whathaveyou)? Would the titles need to be modified? Is there a way to duplicate all listings from one store to import into another? I was just thinking if this doesn't break any Ebay rules it would be a quick and easy way to double the number of listings and in turn potentially increase views and ultimately sales. This perhaps was not an issue in the past but with the new duplicate listing policy, it would seemingly not be doable on one account. Any thoughts?

You are allowed to have two Ebay accounts with the same info, maybe more? But you can't sell the same exact item on two different accounts.

At least, that's what I was told, so I haven't bothered to try.

I see it done all the time so I'm not sure if its against ebay rules, because all the sellers that i see do it are powersellers. They get away with a lot most of the time, but it would not be too wise to bring a lot of attention to a stealth account, most people on the forum would tell you not to do it.

Hmmm, well thanks for the input. It's definitely a questionable thing to do. I was thinking maybe changing the price/shipping may be enough but I know I'll have to be careful.

The TITLE would be the most important thing to modify. Just changing the price and shipping won't be enough, and will put you in violation. Unless of course at least one of the accounts is stealth. Then the title doesn't need changed. Other sellers copy my titles all the time. If you are stealth, then you are in effect another seller (theoretically).

I had a couple "duplicate listings" removed by Ebay. They were GTC and had been running for many months. I would have removed them myself but somehow had missed them. Ebay had said basically don't worry about it, they'll be removed automatically, but somehow it had taken a little extra time to get these 2 combed out. No problem, it didn't affect me really.
I was curious as to how many had been removed from other seller listings so I did a search of one I.D.'s of the "big 4" of Ebay sellers. Usually each of the 4 I.D.'s had over 100,000 active listings. As of this afternoon they each had "only" approximately 10,000 active listings per account.
It seems that even the biggest powersellers were hugely affected when 90% of their listings are gone. What remains to be seen is how this will affect their actual sales. Maybe it will be a little or a lot, but it seems to me that this will somewhat level the playing field.

Duplicate listings policy

Sellers can't use separate listings to sell multiple identical items in the fixed price format at the same time. This includes listing identical items in different categories or using different user IDs.

Make sure your listings follow these guidelines. If they don't, they may be removed, and you may be subject to a range of other actions, including limits of your buying and selling privileges and suspension of your account.

months ago an ebay rep told me that there is no limit as to how many accounts you can make per same name/address/info.
she did not say you couldn't sell same/similar items in the new accounts

That is what they said.

I have 3 account with same information no problem. 1 is buy account and 2 seller accounts. All 3 are the same Paypal account with no problem. But when I create the 4th account as seller and they shut that one down just less than 10 min.

I did tried two time with same problem.