There is one great problem when you develop an eBay business. Although it is your business it will always be eBay that calls the shots, you play by their rules or you do not play at all. In the past there have been cases of high flying Power Sellers who for one reason or another have in eBay’s eyes over stepped the mark and have been either temporarily or permanently banned.

eBay have quite a list of items and actions that are forbidden and it is your responsibility to know these. Not knowing something was wrong is no defense. To find the list of prohibited and restricted items you can visit the A to Z index on the Site Map and select the Prohibited and Restricted Items page. So the first way to get banned is to try and sell any of the items on that list.

The second way to find yourself in trouble is to provide poor or non existent customer service. This is a really good way to attract negative feedback and once your feedback drops below a certain level you may get a call from those nice people at eBay suggesting that you find a different platform to sell your goods.

A third way to attract eBays displeasure is to list items in the wrong categories. Sometimes sellers will try and place a non-relevant item into a really popular category such as cell phones in the hope of benefiting from the high level of traffic. Not a good idea.

The fourth way to fall foul of the system is to include links out from your listing to other web pages. There is only one place on eBay that you can include outward links and that is on the About Me page. The only exception to this rule is that you can place a link to a page that gives further details of the item that you are listing. If you were selling a web site you could include a link to a copy of that web site. However, you would have to deactivate any links on that page such as an order button or any other link that took you from that page.

Finally this may seem obvious but you must have a real product to sell. In the past people have tried to market raffle tickets, catalogues and free items but these are simply not allowed. Recently some sellers have tried to get around this by offering items for as little as 1cent purely to get customer details so that they can offer them items later away from eBay. Recently eBay have started pulling these listings and are obviously getting wise to this ploy.

Ebay offers a really good outlet for anyone and recently it was estimated that around one and a quarter million people around the world use eBay as their regular income source. Therefore it seems silly for anyone to risk being barred from this market place by not sticking to the rules.

Dave Bromley is a full time Internet marketer who is the web master and publisher of the ukauctionline web site and monthly newsletter. To visit the web site and subscribe to thenewsletter visit