eBay Revamps Item Policy & Content Reporting System; Users Flag AI Enforcement Gaps
eBay is rolling out a new process for reporting listings and content that violate its policies, but users worry bad actors have already figured out easy ways to fool AI enforcement bots, allowing possibly dangerous or illegal items to remain on the platform.
If you've tried to report an item for violating eBay policy recently, you may have been surprised to see a message indicating the old functionality is being deprecated and replaced by a new reporting process.
This feature has now been replaced with a new reporting functionality and will be deprecated in the near future. Going forward, please use the new reporting functionality which can be accessed by clicking the question mark icon in the bottom right hand corner of the listing you are reporting, and clicking "Submit a Report" under "Report Content".
The old reporting functionality (that will be going away in the near future) was very clear and obvious with text that says "report this item."
The new functionality is just a simply question mark that floats in the corner as you scroll up and down the page - but with no text or prompting, it's not obvious that would be where you would click to report a policy violation.
Unfortunately, you only get that blue banner informing you of the change after you've clicked on the "report this item" link, so once that goes away, users may have a more difficult time figuring out where/how to report problems.
Once you click on the question mark, you then have to navigate through the various menus and options
Once you've gone multiple levels deep, you have to scroll through a laundry list of options with some that don't even make sense. For example, why would Jewelry in particular be considered "a problem in the listing"?
But most troubling of all may be the checkbox you are required to select before you can submit a report agreeing that eBay may forward your report to the user you are reporting - and that your identity may be disclosed to that user if "strictly necessary".
I understand that eBay may forward this report to the member associated with the content. We will only disclose your identity if your report is not submitted anonymously and the disclosure is strictly necessary
Unfortunately, as eBay is increasingly using AI to "investigate" these reports, users are increasingly frustrated that obvious policy violations are not being recognized and actioned appropriately by the bots.
That led one eBay community member who recently encountered the new reporting feature to question if bad actors have already figured out ways to circumvent AI enforcement by using commas, no spaces, and/or html code to "hide" their misuse of popular brand names in titles for items that are not actually made by that brand.
WastingTime101 posed the following question to eBay community staff:
About 3 weeks ago several listings were reported for brand name misuse. Sellers in China have decided to spam the site with listings labeled as Clorox brand, but they're just generic products from China. The actual Clorox brand product was discontinued several years ago.
View this link. 29 out of 30 results are very obviously violating the brand name misuse policy.
The reports were reviewed by AI and AI determined there was no problem with the listings.
Can you pass this to the appropriate product teams to see if this is a loophole in the programming?
See below screenshot, how it says Clothing,clorox ? Is AI failing to see the misuse of Clorox because it's tied to another word with no spaces? Or is AI ignoring the title and only looking at the brand item specific which says unbranded?
Edit to add:
If I go through the new reporting overlay, it shows the word Clorox in the title is interrupted with code. Perhaps that's the loophole impacting AI's ability to detect abuse?
I tried reporting one of these listings through the new system myself and had the same disappointing experience - eBay's magical AI almost immediately informed me it found nothing wrong with the listing.
Have you used eBay's new report item functionality and if so, what were the results? Let us know in the comments below!
