I used to work on buying keywords at eBay 10 years ago, and one of the first features we built was a suppression list to prevent exactly this, so I'm a little surprised to see this. These ads can be costly, embarrassing, or carry a legal liability. It's possible they dropped the ball with a big bug that no one noticed, but it's also possible an affiliate was buying these ads hoping to turn a conversion.
eBay should have shut down these affiliates years ago; they're not adding marginal value and they hurt the brand, because it lets any moron associate a crappy ad message with eBay's name.
Comments
I used to work on buying keywords at eBay 10 years ago, and one of the first features we built was a suppression list to prevent exactly this, so I'm a little surprised to see this. These ads can be costly, embarrassing, or carry a legal liability. It's possible they dropped the ball with a big bug that no one noticed, but it's also possible an affiliate was buying these ads hoping to turn a conversion.
eBay should have shut down these affiliates years ago; they're not adding marginal value and they hurt the brand, because it lets any moron associate a crappy ad message with eBay's name.