Competitor Trying To Drive Me Off Ebay, What Should I Do?

I have a pretty good ebay business in my niche. Recently a competitor or mine called me and asked to buy my account. I told him I wasn't interested in selling and also that's against ebay TOS. He says if I don't sell to him he will drive prices down so low I can't compete, drive me off ebay and then raise prices.

He has bought pretty much all top accounts in our niche, he has like 10 stores going all selling same product, has duplicate listings in all his stores, is essentially dominating the best match search feature.

I'm not willing to break ebay rules by trying to purchase others accounts or starting multiple accounts just to try to dominate search, with my luck I'll wind up getting kciekd off for the very same stuff he's doing. If you were in my situation what would you do?

Request his contact details, or buy something from him and check the return label. Put that bitches postcode into your sat nav and end him.

Contact ebay and tell them about his methods? I don't know if this will help but you can give it a try

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Defiantly report him, and forward some sort of fake email alongside it to ebay, showing that he had contacted you offline or something to buy your items and leave negative feedback. Ebay won't go back to him to confirm this, but it gives him 2 blackmarks.

Generally I'm not one to tattle or report someone just for the sake of reporting them but this guy has like a dozen accounts half of which he purchased that had over 5,000 feedback. He lists duplicates under all his accounts and basically dominates ebay. I report his duplicates they get taken down and he puts them right back up and still has top ranking. I actually sent emails to pretty much every list on the secret ebay/paypal email contact info stuff and they took him down for like one day and he was right back at it. I don't know what else I can do

Have you actually thought about selling to him? Ask him how much he would offer you, it might be worth it, and you could sell on amazon or your own store instead. Just a thought.

I list one duplicate and they take it down in a ny minute. If I had this issue I would have a ton of ebay stealth accounts and hammer him with negatives. Then I would get his info, make a stealth using his details... you know the rest.

He claims he bought one of the accounts for 100k, however he lies alot so I don't know if he's being honest or not. When he proposed it to me he was trying to only offer me like 7k, i can make that in a relatively short period of time anyway plus use ebay to drive traffic to my site as well so dont wanna get off ebay. aslo he's done most of the work in eliminating the competition so aside from him being a dominating force he's realy teh only one i have to compete with. my beef however is I play by the rules and can't compete because of it and he brazenly violates them all and stays at the top of searches and continues to do so w/o any consequences.

I would report all of the accounts he uses and send copies of your emails to eBay.

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Contact ebay Sure they would be happy to get rid of him. Good for them good for you, everybody happy

How long can he keep the prices low?

Lets see.... (don't play his game - leave your prices where they are now though) just make sure your service and support is 10 times better than his.

If your business is worth that much to you, prepare for full war. Sounds like he has more to lose than you

Starting a war he can't finish is a bad move IMO.

I say report him to ebay if you are so inclined, they are fairly good about their tos, try to bait him into e-mailing you some terms first though, so you can forward it on to support your case. If he contacted you over the phone it is probably because he is trying to avoid a paper trail so that might not work. I'm not sure if you are from, but if you are from the U.S. only 13 states have two party phone recording laws: California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Mass, Mich, Montana, Nevada, New Hampsh, Penn, Washington. If you are both in the US and neither of you are in these states you are allowed to record a phone call without his knowledge or consent (not a lawyer, this is not legal advise, do your own research yada yada)

If you don't feel like reporting him, ride it out. He can only drive down prices so far and for so long before he needs to put food on the table too. My "9-5" is a family business that I inherited that got hit hard by the financial meltdown. I had very little work for several years and had large companies trying to get me to jump through hoops for work at a sub market price with less than ideal conditions. I got a part time job to help pay the bills (this is how I got interested in IM) and held firm what I knew my 9-5 skills were worth. It was lean for a couple of years, but most of my competitors are gone now because they couldn't hack it, and now I cant keep up. Provide solid service at a fair price and your customers will respect you, it may be lean for a while, but people get tired of fly by night junk and revert to quality.

If you're a big seller on eBay, maybe the best way to do things to gain revenue and confuse your competition would be to branch into new fields of merchandise?

Any interest? Can get you authentic branded merchandise. Send me a PM if you're interested and we can discuss.

Save all the proofs you can. This includes any email from him, link to all accounts you know he has, any PM he sent you, the items he is selling, the duplicate listings and everything that comes to your mind.
Also buy cheap items from 2,3 of the accounts he owns to get all the details about him.

Then send all details to Ebay & Paypal.


He can ruin your business, be sure of that. By lowering the price don't think of a big amount that he can't afford. Instead of $30 regular price he will make it $28 and he still earns money. If he is buying everything from his niche, he surely get the products for a really low price.

Fight against him, don't expect him to fall because he will not.


Good luck buddy.

Well instead of playing the "price-match" game, why not brand your products as something of higher quality than the rest of the competition.

People are willing to pay top dollar as long the quality is there. With the game your competitor is playing, this is the best way for you to separate yourself from the pack.

Contact ebay and let them know what he is doing. That he wanted to buy your account and so one. Let them take care of it.

Ha. I 've been in in a same situation just couple of months ago. The guy has bough all of my products, duplicated it and listed on eBay for almost half of my price.

So, what I did was bought few of his product ( the cheapest ones for around 3-4$) from different eBay accounts.(Luckily, I've build a good eBay reputation for over 5 years for many accounts)

Anyway, once you do that, you pretty much got him by the balls. Just leave him a load of negative feedback, saying something like "LIAR, ITEM IS NOT AS DESCRIBED" etc. Result - "no longer a registered user"

I know it's a little dirty...but it's just business.

PS. What is up with moderating system on this forum? You're not allowed to post words like "c r a p"? Took me 10 minutes to modify my funny post into this until it got accepted...

Yes, notify Ebay of this "marketing" practices and let them deal with him. I had a bastard on Ebay that tried to rip me off but I had contacted Ebay and they agreed with me.