eBay Question and Answers

[George & Helen Myers]

I just discovered that questions that you send to the seller about an item on eBay and also the sellers response may be posted by the seller below the item description. This is at the sellers discretion. Once posted, this information can not be removed or altered from the description.

See: http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/answer_qs.html

My advice is to be careful what you information you enter in your question and hope that the seller does likewise.....Helen

[Harry]

No fooling! That was an absolute shock to me the first time it happened when my RESPONSE was posted automatically. I did not approve of it nor did I set it up in my parameters. Fortunately, I had behaved myself.

Email is private and it should stay that way. I think eBay has made a mistake in doing this.

[BobRR]

Boy I agree. I emailed my shipping info to get a price on shipping and they posted it BobRR

[George & Helen Myers]

According to the eBay info on the Q&A page, you have to check the box to publicly display the message but I bet it is the reverse, meaning that the box has to be unchecked to not send. The seller involved in my case was new to eBay and has been quite apologetic because he included our email address in a response to another party that was in one of his two reponses.

I agree, I think the communication should be private....Helen

[Scott]

As a seller you have to check the box to display the question and answer at the bottom of your listing.

[KidDynamo]

The seller has to check the box, as of today, furthermore, the seller can't edit the question and so can't "protect" a rash questioner from poorly chosen words and still take advantage of the feature.

I, too, as a questioner, wasn't misbehaving but hadn't planned on revealing my interest in the item to the world. My eBay name show up on the question and so "spilled the beans".

It seems that the solution is to not use your name, or eBay name, or any other revealing words in a question to the seller, regardless of your tactics.

I think the eBay question form automatically uses a "polite" intro and salutation to the seller that identifies your eBay name to the seller but this stuff does not show up if the question is promoted to the listing.

So just type the basic question and no more.