Policy change at eBay! SUCCESS FOR CATHOLICS!

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Fergal

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My dear friends,
I have just received an email from eBay confirming that they are broadening their policies and in future will not allow sale of the Blessed Sacrament. CONGRATS to all who took time to pray and write on this matter. See, in numbers we are so strong!!
Well Done. A day to celebrate.

The text of today’s email received follows:
***Hello,

Thank you for your email regarding the sale of the Holy Eucharist by one
of our community members. We respect and appreciate your comments
regarding this sensitive matter.

As you may know, eBay does not sell items itself. Rather, we are a
global marketplace for sellers and buyers who transact directly with one
another. Each day eBay’s sellers list 5 million items on the site, and
those sellers decide what items they want to list. eBay did not
possess, list or approve the sale of the Eucharist. The buyer and
seller completed the Eucharist transaction on April 11th, before eBay
even became aware of the listing.

As a marketplace, we strive to respect the diverse perspectives of our
sellers. We also work hard to promote an open environment for trade.
That said, eBay has policies in place to remove listings for illegal
items as well as highly offensive listings that promote hate or
intolerance.

We understand that the listing of the Eucharist was highly upsetting to
Catholic members of the eBay community and Catholics globally. Once
this completed sale was brought to our attention, we consulted with a
number of our users, including members of the Catholic Church,
concerning what course we should take in the future should a similar
listing appear on our site. We also consulted with members of other
religions about items that might also be highly sacred and inappropriate
for sale. As a result of this dialogue, we have concluded that sales of
the Eucharist, and similar highly sacred items, are not appropriate on
eBay. ****We have, therefore, broadened our policies and will remove those
types of listings should they appear on the site in the future. ******

As always, we welcome and appreciate the assistance of the community in
upholding the rules of our site. Should you see another Eucharist
listed on our site, we encourage you to notify us so we can take
appropriate action. Further, we encourage you to directly communicate
with the seller. **Members are often unaware that a particular item is
offensive to others. A respectful e-mail to the seller is often all
that is needed for the seller to voluntarily remove the item. We
believe this modification strikes the appropriate balance between
respect for our community’s values and our goal of providing an open
marketplace offering practically anything on earth.

Again, we sincerely appreciate your concern and thank you for
communicating your views with us. Your (name removed by moderator)ut has helped us frame a
policy that will enable us to better serve our diverse community of
users around the world.

Regards,
Veronyca on behalf of Bill Cobb
Community Watch Team
eBay Trust & Safety*
 
Bravo! I sent them several emails including one that stated they could be complicit in fraud since there was no way of verifying whether a Host was blessed.I figured they’d respond more to a threat of financial harm than concern about our feelings. Whatever happened, I am glad this is no longer an issue.

Lisa N
 
Hooray! I had been planning to start a home business selling plants from my garden on Ebay, and yesterday I waved goodbye to that dream and closed my Ebay account, saying “Because you continue to allow the sale of the Eucharist, as a Catholic I feel I can’t keep using Ebay” . I wasn’t able to find any alternative online auction site that would work - THANK YOU GOD! I’m opening a new account today!
:bounce: :dancing: :clapping:
 
I hope they send that same email to the rest of us who wrote regarding the sale of the Eucharist!

Here is the email they sent me on April 19th:
We understand that you are upset at having seen certain Catholic items
on eBay. Because eBay’s community is a diverse, international group of
users with varied backgrounds and beliefs, there are times when some
items listed on eBay might be offensive to at least some of our users
somewhere in the world. At times, members may see auctions that could be
considered morally wrong or objectionable. However, even though these
auctions may be offensive to some, please remember that most of the time
the law does not prohibit the items.

Due to the fact that eBay’s focus is to have a free and diverse
community, we are reluctant to interfere with auctions that are not
illegal. Regarding offensive items, there are many items that are
considered sacred to many people of various religions, and we sometimes
hear complaints about these items. Examples would be Catholic relics of
saints, LDS garments, certain Buddhist tablets, etc. However, eBay has
made the decision not to prohibit any item only the basis of the item
being endowed with sacred properties by certain religious groups. In
general, eBay will remove items for a violation of our Offensive
Materials policy only in extreme examples that usually involve death or
murder. For instance, crime scene videos and certain Nazi items are not
allowed. However, at this point, as eBay is religiously neutral, we do
not remove religious items that are otherwise legal for sale.

Please keep in mind that many of us at eBay may also share your distaste
with an item, and may not support the sale. In fact, eBay has many
Catholic employees. However, we do our best to understand and tolerate
the many viewpoints held by our worldwide community. Catholic items are
not prohibited on eBay, and they are generally allowed as long as the
seller does not otherwise include hateful text or images in the listing.
Although we realize that you may not agree with this decision on eBay’s
part, we hope that you can respect the diverse and open nature of eBay’s
marketplace.

We appreciate the fact that you may disagree with our position on this
issue. We cannot change our guidelines based on your objection. If you
would like to see a change in one of our policies or procedures, I might
suggest you take a moment to submit your concerns in this regard through
our community feedback form, which can be accessed by navigating your
browser to the following URL:

pages.ebay.com/community/suggestion/

Thank you for your time.

So glad to see that they continued to review this matter and apparently made the necessary policy adjustments!!!
:clapping:
 
Lisa N:
Bravo! I sent them several emails including one that stated they could be complicit in fraud since there was no way of verifying whether a Host was blessed.I figured they’d respond more to a threat of financial harm than concern about our feelings. Whatever happened, I am glad this is no longer an issue.

Lisa N
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Yep, nothing honorable or noble in their decision. It is all a matter of economics, and the Catholic market was made heard. If the financial sway was in favor of continuing with their now former policy, nothing would have changed. Bravo to the voice of Catholics! in standing up for what is sacred.
 
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felra:
Yep, nothing honorable or noble in their decision. It is all a matter of economics
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Agreed, but there is one advantage to this–eBay might sit up and take notice if Catholics are offended by anything else. Now they know we are a force to be reckoned with.
 
I can only speculate about Ebay’s motives in changing its policy, but I seem to recall a Saint (Francis DeSales? Probably a lot of them.) recommending that we always give another person the benefit of the doubt and put the best possible construction on his motives.

For details about the history of this controversy and its resolution, see www.boycottebay.org
 
It is not eBay, I mean they cannot possobly monitor everything what listed, They have huge amount of auctions.

Ebay all of us, people, people selling wrong stuff, and ebay help it stay legal and right, they work hard for it…

So all they can do is to monitor what on sale already.

There is way to fight.

Same as copyrighted items, owners of such rights run favorite searches on ebay by names of the product, eBay will email right away, if something with keywords comes up. Then if something wrong with listing you just report it to eBay.

Some more info about amazon and ebay here:

aliksandre.blogspot.com
 
Dr. Colossus:
Agreed, but there is one advantage to this–eBay might sit up and take notice if Catholics are offended by anything else. Now they know we are a force to be reckoned with.
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Yes, we are. I am thrilled to hear this news. Ani.
 
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aliksand:
It is not eBay, I mean they cannot possibly monitor everything what listed, They have huge amount of auctions.
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I agree. Ebay is NOT going to monitor what they sell for offensiveness to Catholics. They’ll react, however, to the objections of various religious groups to the sale of certain items considered sacred to those groups.

And, they have, appropriately, to our objections to the sale of “Holy Eucharists.”
 
Well, maybe some other CA forum members and myself were crazy for bidding millions of dollars but I hope it helped get eBay’s management’s attention (besides the boycott and letters) and also hope that the Holy Spirit was working in them to reach this decision.

I’ve had a search running already and will keep it running to keep me posted in case another auction comes up. eBay typically cancels auctions of banned items pretty quickly when notified. In the past, I’ve e-mailed them at suggest@ebay.com.

Thanks to everyone who helped one way or another!
 
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vdicarlo:
I can only speculate about Ebay’s motives in changing its policy, but I seem to recall a Saint (Francis DeSales? Probably a lot of them.) recommending that we always give another person the benefit of the doubt and put the best possible construction on his motives.

For details about the history of this controversy and its resolution, see www.boycottebay.org
Click to expand...
I know what you mean. Their reply to my email was very polite and when they did change their policy they sent me a detailed email explaining it. Perhaps they only cjanged their policy for money reasons but if we can change wrong policies while remaining polite to each other so much the better.
 
I just went to the restricted items on the EBAY list and I don’t know how they categorized the Holy Eucharist, I checked all over and I do not see that clearly, can you find it?
pages.ebay.com/help/policies/items-ov.html

I must have missed it, and call me doubting Thomas, but until I see it listed will I believe it.
 
That’s what I thought, so it must still be open season, unless it is specified, I just won’t believe it.
 
I also threatned to terminate my account with them. Their first letter to me was stating that they would not change their stance and asked to me to reconsider. I said, “You will not change your rules, so neither will I”. A couple of days later I received another and after much flack from many catholics and religious groups (we won!) they have changed their mind and stated this kind of sale will not be allowed in the future. See what can happen when we all stick together and defend our faith. We are headed for much persecution because of our beliefs and we are going to be put to the test. I pray we are all strong enough to defend the church’s teachings.
God bless all those involved in bringing down this giant, Ebay.
 
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