New Law: Auctioneer School For Ebayers?

[mandy]

All around the United States, state regulators are increasingly miffed at the revenue loss due to eBay auctioneers' insistence they don't need to go to auctioneer school to peddle their (or somebody else's) wares online. Every few months, another state says enough is enough and the various Sheriffs of Nottingham want their cuts.

full article: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnew...ayers.html

[bargainbloodhound]

Neither eBay nor sellers on the site are auctioneers by the traditional and statutory definitions of the term," said Durzy.

Uh oh, I agree with Hani Dizy on something  :blinkie:

I don't think that the average eBay seller selling their own items is an "auctioneer" in the traditional sense.

A case could be made (and has been made by many states) that eBay consignment sellers are auctioneers, but here again things get fuzzy when you consider that many consignment sellers do a large share of their business through non-auction listings like 'buy it now', 'fixed price', and 'store inventory'. Is a consignment seller who lists an auction item with a buy it now price an auctioneer only if the item is sold with a bid rather than through 'buy it now' ?  Does selling a fixed price item on consignment on an "auction" site like eBay make one an auctioneer, while selling a consigned fixed price item on a web site does not...?

Trying to impose auctioneer license rules on sellers at online auction venues who derive a large part of their income from fixed price sales would be difficult to enforce legally and would put a huge burden on sellers and on the states themselves if they hired the number of people that would be required to enforce these rules.

The other ridiculous thing is that so far none of the states that have tried to require auctioneer licenses have rewritten their auctioneer training and licensing requirements to reflect the differences between online and offline auctions:

The path to becoming a state-certified auctioneer usually involves attending a special school complete with high-speed auction-ese vocal training