I used to sell my digital products on eBay some time ago - I think that the last time was in late 2005, before I sold my eBook site.  Fast forward 2.5 years to today…

I now own the eBooks site again and decide I would like to try eBay as an avenue to get sales.  Easy enough - I'll list my eBook…

On ebay.co.uk

Nope, that won't work as eBay UK don't allow the listing of ANY digital product, even if the seller is the IP/copyright owner and registered with as Vero owner.  From the horses mouth;

Please understand that at present, listing items with digital delivery is not available on the UK site of eBay. In this case, you can list your item on the US site of eBay.

Fair enough - it's no big deal.  Off to .com it is…

On eBay.com

All going swimmingly well - new rules indicate you MUST list any digital item only in the "everything else > information products" category.  From the horses mouth;

Using the Classified Ads format, sellers receive a 30-day ad at a fixed price. This solution enables sellers to continue to market their digital goods on eBay; however, because Classified Ad listings are a lead generation tool and do not result in transactions that go through eBay, Feedback cannot be exchanged between buyer and seller.

Sellers who wish to continue to offer digital goods can do so by selecting the Everything Else>Information Products category in the Sell Your Item form and choosing the Classified Ads format (not auction-style or fixed price).

OK, fair enough - but "everything else > information products" is not a selectable catgeory as it's a parent category.  A few emails back and forth to eBay customer service resulted in them giving answers to lots of questions I never asked and not answering the question I did ask, namely "how to select this category"…

Selecting a category INSIDE "everything else > information products" worked just fine, but when I got right to the end of the Sell Your Item form pages, an error message stated "you are useless, please add your item in "everything else > information products" only" (well, words to that effect anyway).  So back to the drawing board.  I need to find out how to add products to a category that is unselectable…

As I had no help from eBay UK, I decided to try eBay Live Help.  After pointing out the problem, they fixed the whole thing in less than two minutes - I'm not sure what they did and I don't care - I just wanted the listing live!

Anyways, as of right now I have my product listed on eBay. As classified ads last for 30 days, I'll probably need to go through this whole debacle again.

I wonder why eBay makes things so difficult for sellers?  To be frank, I don't understand why people listed with their own Vero program cannot list digital items in any way they please - doesn't make much sense to me.  Anyone care to explain why eBay are unable to allow this?

Supposedly the main reason is due to feedback abuse - people buying/selling hundreds of 1p items in order to get feedback ratings quickly.  Here's a couple of ideas for eBay;

• allow digital products priced above (say) £5 to be listed normally.  Who's going to buy a £5 product to increase their feedback?

  OR

• disallow feedback on items less than (say) £5.  If you can't get feedback on cheap items, it can't be abused.

Both these make sense to me - perhaps the price limitation more so than the feedback limitation.  Seems like a crappy kneejerk reaction by eBay UK to disallow vendors based on what they sell