Restoring a partially suspended account | Rules and safety

ovidiu_alexa · 2025-02-13T21:03:56.315000Z

Greetings everyone, This post is quite long, but I need to explain a problem I’ve been trying to sort out for a few months now. In June 2021, when I was living in Italy, I opened my first eBay account and successfully sold a variety of items. I kept selling until September 2021, when I permanently moved to London, in the United Kingdom, for family and study reasons. From that moment until September 2024, just a few months ago, I no longer used eBay or sold anything, as I focused on other activities. However, that same month, a colleague of mine who runs a wholesale business selling dried and dehydrated fruit and nuts suggested I try selling some products online. Having already had experience with eBay, I suggested trying that platform (and not others), and so we started selling a variety of products online using the same account I had opened four years earlier in Italy. The reason I chose to use that account instead of creating a new one (which we eventually did anyway) was the fact that it already had excellent feedback, which I thought could be a good starting point. Everything went well until one day in December, when I received a message telling me that my account had been partially restricted without any explicit reason. The message said that I could still sell and use all eBay functions normally, but the only thing I could not do was withdraw funds from the account. The first thing I did was contact eBay customer support in the United Kingdom. They couldn’t help much, other than suggesting I contact eBay Italy, since the account had been opened in Italy and was therefore tied to that specific eBay department. After sending an email to eBay Italy, I was told that to restore the account I would need to resolve all pending cases and contact every single customer to verify whether they had received their package. At that time, in fact, I had two open cases due to shipping delays, which I promptly resolved. In addition, I had to contact each customer individually, since during those months I was using the untracked shipping services offered by Royal Mail (the equivalent of Poste Italiane in the United Kingdom), which are generally cheaper than tracked ones. After completing both tasks and waiting a couple of days to allow customers to reply, I wrote to eBay Italy again. However, I was told that since not all customers had replied, I would need to provide three documents: my passport, proof of residence, and a receipt showing that the products sold were actually mine. When I contacted the customers, I thought that if they left positive feedback or didn’t reply to me, it could be considered that the package had been properly delivered, but apparently that is not the case. I remember doing both identity verification and address verification back in 2021, but I would have happily done it again if necessary. I could easily have provided the passport and the receipts confirming that the products sold were mine (although this request made me think about how it works with other kinds of products. For example, if I receive a gift or sell something I bought many years ago, how can I provide a receipt?). Proof of residence, on the other hand, was more complicated. Having moved from Italy to the United Kingdom, I clearly couldn’t provide an Italian proof of residence document. I explained my situation to eBay Italy, telling them everything exactly as I am doing in this post, but they replied that they cannot do anything because the proof of residence must show exactly the same address registered on the eBay account. They also told me that proof of residence from other countries is not accepted. So I tried to change the residence address directly in my account, but eBay does not allow changing the country, only the street number, address, city, region, and postal code. The country, in fact, is set and fixed at the time of registration. I called eBay Customer Service twice to explain everything from scratch, but they also couldn’t help me with changing the address. One last attempt I made was to change the bank details, since that automatically triggers both an identity verification and a bank confirmation through two microtransactions. I completed both operations successfully, but unfortunately nothing changed. After this episode, my colleague and I opened a UK-based account, which is now doing well. Obviously I will no longer sell anything on my old account. The only reason I want to restore it is to withdraw about €350 (≈ £292), that is, the money from previous sales. I know that in business terms it’s not a large amount, but it is capital that does not belong to me and that I therefore need to recover. Has anyone ever been in a similar situation? Is there a way to resolve this issue or bring it to the attention of higher levels at eBay? Thank you very much.

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Restoring a partially suspended account | Rules and safety | eBay Italy