Hello… This is Sharat Digumarti, and I manage a team responsible for Trust & Safety at eBay India. Over the past few months, we have heard a lot of feedback from our sellers on the policies of the site, as well as the consequences of violating these policies. I want to give everyone a quick update of what we have achieved so far to address these issues, as well as share some of our plans for 2006.

Making policies easy to understand
Did you know we have over 100 policies? These policies are designed to keep the eBay marketplace healthy and to maintain a safe place to buy and sell. We recognized that some of our policies were hard to understand, even for me. So last year, we spent several months rewriting our policy pages in straightforward language to make policies easier to understand. Now each page includes: a clear statement of the policy and why we have it; examples that illustrate what is and isn’t allowed; and a list of the possible consequences of violating the policy. (To learn more, please visit our Policy Hub page.)

Educating members about policies
Understanding eBay’s policies helps members to be more effective buyers and sellers. Last year we focused on creating educational materials on the site designed to help members understand and comply with our policies. We now have five online tutorials available for Intellectual Property & VeRO, Shill Bidding, Fee Circumvention, Feedback, and Search & Browse Manipulation.
These new tutorials only take a few minutes to complete, stepping members through the details they need to know in order to stay in compliance. They can also be used as effective training materials for sellers who may have other people who help them run their businesses and who need to understand the rules. In 2006, we will also be launching a new comprehensive Marketplace Policy tutorial that covers all our biggest policy areas.

Enforcing policy violation consequences and mitigation
The vast majority of sellers and PowerSellers on eBay are good people who comply with eBay’s policies in the overall interest of the marketplace. Our job has been twofold:
1) to create more ways to educate sellers who may unintentionally violate the rules, and
2) to put new consequences in place that effectively penalize the "bad apples" – those few sellers who intentionally violate the rules.

We’ll be adding more consequences in 2006. These include:

• Restricting repeat policy violators’ ability to sell for a period of time – Depending on how often a seller has violated our policies in a 90-day period, they may be required to complete a 15-minute tutorial or they could be restricted from listing new items for up to 3 days.
• Retaining eBay fees when cancelling a repeat violator’s listings for List Practices violations – If a seller repeatedly violates policies in a 90-day period despite previously having taken a tutorial on those policies, we are going to keep their listing and feature fees on subsequent listing cancellations for policy violations. We feel strongly that this is a level-playing field issue and that we need to create a financial penalty for these sellers who cannot be rehabilitated through education alone.

Making it easy to detect policy violations
One of the most important ways we learn about listings that violate our policies is through reports from other Community members. You have told us that the process for reporting suspicious activity has been too cumbersome. So to make it easier for members to send us these reports, later in 2006, every item page will have a "Report this Item" link at the bottom of the page. This link will by pass the Contact Us flow and take you to a list of possible reasons why a listing needs to be brought to our attention. It will save you valuable time and help us review the listing quickly.

We have started a discussion thread on the Community forums for users to discuss these changes. You can access this thread by clicking here - http://forums.ebay.in/thread.jspa?threadID=600000290. You can use this thread to share with us your feedback on these areas, as well as ask us questions.

Finally, I want to add a note here to thank our members who do report suspicious activity on the site. We need – and truly appreciate – your help in keeping the marketplace safe.

Thanks,
Sharat Digumarti
eBay India Trust & Safety Team