November 27th, 2009 by Skip McGrath

I was listing some new items we picked up for Christmas last week and since I was awarded eBay’s Top Rated Seller status, I thought it would be a good marketing tactic to point that out to my buyers.

So I launched a few listings and forgot about them.  A few days later I was going through my My eBay listings pages and didn’t see them.  “That’s strange,” I thought. So I went over to Vendio where I manage my listings and saw them in the pending file with an error message that my listings were rejected by eBay because there were prohibited words in my listings.  I looked over the listings and couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so I called eBay PowerSeller support.

The folks there are pretty nice and very patient.  The rep that I reached took the time to pull up my listings and read through them.  After a minute or so he said: “Aha. I found the problem.” And then he read the following statement from my listing.

“We are top rated sellers on eBay and committed to giving our buyers 5-star service.”

“What is wrong with that?” I asked.

He explained that eBay does not allow sellers to mention anything about being top rated sellers or how many stars you have as it could mislead people.  Apparently there was a policy notice on that but I had missed it.

So if you have seen you listings cancelled and can’t figure out why, take a look at your statements and make sure you are not telling your bidders and buyers that you give good service and will take care of them. As eBay figures out you may be trying to mislead people.