Our brick and mortar fitness equipment retail store has been open for two years now, and started selling on eBay to find a wider range of customers. For reasons eBay will not provide, our business was targeted by their "Trust & Safety" department, to drag us through a mind-numbing bureaucratic process of proving our legitimacy. Even with multiple successful sales and only positive reviews, eBay was convinced we were offering items that did not exist, and so demanded documentation proving ownership of our inventory. To begin this process, they halted all of our account activity, taking down currently listed items and deleting the history of every sale we'd made on the account. This made it difficult to furnish them with the requested documentation because we had no way of knowing what items we had sold on their platform without the account history. I asked them about this difficulty in every single one of the 20+ messages I sent them throughout this process, but they never answered that question. They never even acknowledged it. When I tried to send them random invoices from our vendors on what items I could only guess we sold through eBay, they only replied over and over and over again with requests for that exact same information (all of the requests looked like generic copy/paste scripts giving the impression no one was even reading my replies or reviewing my uploads). I uploaded the same documents 5 times before I finally explained to them I cannot justify spending any more time on the matter, and will seek a more efficient solution myself. Through researching how other sellers deal with the inane harassment of eBay's support staff, I found that thousands of users are abusing the system in hundreds of different ways, and not just to stay off eBay's radar in order to sell legitimately. There are many methods and tactics being used to create an unfair bidding/buying environment, avoid eBay and PayPal selling fees, redirect eBay traffic offsite etc, and those users are happily earning profits right under the noses of these "meticulous" watchdogs. So, while our business is taking care to follow eBay's terms of service, submit to their bureaucratic demands, and do business with eBay in a mutually beneficial partnership, other sellers enjoy a headache free and financially unfettered selling environment because the eBay support staff is so busy copy/pasting scripted requests that aim to crush a person's last nerve. There are many online selling channels to go through, and my advice is not to utilize eBay unless you are ready to be unscrupulous in your dealings.