If Ebay keeps pulling this **bleep** they are going to drive themselves completely out of the market place.

In Ebay's own words regarding their picture policy :

Question "Why does Ebay have this policy?"

Answer:

"High quality images improve the buying experience. Listings that follow these guidelines are more likely to result in a sale and show up in Google or other search engines."

I totally agree with that statement..... that is why I spend countless hours and untold money on equipment, programs and wages to create pictures that will stand out from most of the others on Ebay......so why are they trying to make it impossible for the sellers with professional, high quality, photos who deal in quality products to stand out from their competition including other sellers with new products as well as part time yard sale and used goods sellers?

I have watermarked my photos for years in an attempt to protect them from being copied by other sellers. They still get copied but no where near as much as they will without the watermarks. When Ebay's policy was that you were not allowed to copy pictures from other listings it made it very easy to prove it was my picture when it was copied.

Now they are saying you go ahead and spend all that time and money to make your images stand out so we can share it with every other seller on the internet who has a simillar product to sell with a few quick clicks on their keyboard. If they are not going to allow watermarks then they should protect the images from being copied.

They also need to get off our backs with all these changes they keep piling on one after another. I just spent over a week recently editing all of my listings to remove the "active content" they wanted out.... even though it didn't seem to make any change in the listings at all... I clicked on every one of them and clicked their remove active content link.

Now that is done I am having to go through every listing again to remove links to outside web sites. We have already spent 3 days working on this and we are still just under half finished. What really gets my blood boiling is that they are calling links to things like the Turbo Lister program they used to sponsor and the My Store Rewards Program they encouraged us to sign up for over 10 years ago links to outside web sites.... even though they were Ebay sponsored programs at the time. Those are the only links in my listings but now I have to go through each listing one by one to remove them because some rocket scientist at Ebay has decided they are against policy now.

I was absolutely thrilled to get the latest update telling me that even after changing the size of over 3,000 photos not that long ago, I now have to go through and replace almost 4,000 pictures with watermarks with ones that are not watermarked so other sellers can have a free-for-all copying them.

I have already started selling on 2 other sites. If this continues I will not be staying on Ebay. I don't have enough time to keep up with all their ridiculous demands and still grow my business. I am surprised that anyone does.