>eBay is going after items that fall under “egregious” shipping. The next step is to define the “grey” area — what is black vs white? Since eBay has not stretched the definition of “excessive” yet, eBay can not be proactive in ending listings that violate policy. The first issue is that eBay no longer is a “venue” status if they proactively end listings. It’ll be interesting to see if eBay will be proactive in this way.

In my opinion, “excessive shipping” is unique to each category and subcategories. If eBay wants to enforce this policy, perhaps eBay could sysmetically analyze the top 10% of items that meet the “excessive shipping” policy. Take a look at the shipping calculator figures (e.g. weigh & handling amount). While this data is not complete, eBay could use this data to determine what is “excessive” for that subcategory. The dollar value would be a rolling average, say over 6 months. eBay could diligently work to bring this average down over time. If the average decreases, then they know they have effectively reduced “excessive” shipping in the category. I like this idea because the “excessive shipping” value is unique to each subcategory. This also provides customer service a concrete dollar value to determine if an item is considered “excessive”. Of course, all a seller has to do is increase the “weight” of their item to avoid this loophole, but let’s see if eBay will have a clever counter for this.