3 replies to this topic

[bobmeetin]

I'm setting up one of my clients with an eBay store. In looking through a bunch of live stores, when you select to view info about the store, if you page down you will find a section called Favorite Links. Generally the store owner lists his/her site there but in some cases I see half a dozen links. When I login as a store owner I don't see where to edit this item.

Can any of you link exchange experts point me in the right direction? Thx, Bob

[Randy]

I think I know what you're looking for Bob, even though it's been quite awhile since I've actively used eBay.

• Log into your eBay account as normal.
• Mouse over the Account tab and select Personal Information
• In the first section of this new page you should see "About Me page" From there you can select either View to view your current About Me page, or you can choose to Edit it to add/remove stuff.

You can use either your own html or their template sysetm to create an About Me page. Using the template is probably the easiest the first time. You can always take that code and tweak it, turning it into your own html.

Note too that eBay places some restrictions on what you can do with these favorite links. You'll want to review those guidelines. Like I said, it's been awhile since I've fooled around with eBay (I still have an account, just don't use it anymore) but if memory serves you have to be a little careful when linking over to your own site to make sure you're not directly competing with eBay by linking to products you don't sell on eBay.

[bobmeetin]

Randy, yeah that was it. When I first looked through the Accounts tab it was very "unobvious" where Links was stored because of where it was buried. Before i submitted the post I looked through eBay help and also googled
"'Favorite links' eBay" but all it brought me to was a bunch of sample stores with links.

And yes thanks also for the pointer on eBay policies. It clearly adds some restrictions to my thought process. Yet curiously the eBay store that my client is using as a model is violating the guidelines regarding linking to a store that sells comparable merchandise.

I'd bet your salary that if I had the time to go through a batch of stores and looked through their link lists that this is probably common place. Which leads to the question, do they ever do cross-checking or do they trust you to do the honorable thing and if they do find violators, how are they handled?

Happy camper... Bob

[Randy]

do they ever do cross-checking

Not that I ever saw. Maybe if someone reported something to them, but otherwise I highly doubt they check any of those.

Back in the day when I was using eBay to blow out some excess inventory the favorite links was a severe grey area. I'm going from memory here, but then the policy as it was applied was that you could link to your web site, even if it sold stuff that wasn't in your eBay store as long as you didn't link to something like a shopping cart page that pulled up an item that wasn't in your eBay store. It was seriously screwy, but there was a lot of discussion about it even back then.

You might want to take a look in their Community Forums to see if it's still a raging debate and to get a feel for how the policy is being applied these days. Push come to shove though I wonder how much they'd do about it even if they found someone directly breaking that sort of ambigious rule. Or to put it another way, would they seriously consider shutting down someone's account who was paying them every week over a favorite link on a single page? Or would they simply email the account owner and tell them the link needed to be removed. Or possibly remove it for them and send and email not to do it again.

My guess would be the account probably wouldn't be at a lot of risk if you didn't do something pretty darned flagrant.