Auction site EBay bans all magic potions and other oddities such as spells, curses, hexing and the list goes on. The company doesn’t seem to like witches and selling your soul to someone else is also now forbidden. The company is constantly dealing with complaints and having to remove items on a regular basis.
“EBay regularly reviews categories and updates our policies based on customer feedback,” the company said in a statement. “We are discontinuing a small number of categories within the larger metaphysical subcategory, as buyers and sellers have told us that transactions in these categories often result in issues that can be difficult to resolve.”
It’s obvious this latest product ban creates a problem for both snake oil salesmen and the gullible public. Sellers of such intangible goods are sharing their outrage on eBay forums, and a Don’t Ban Our Psychics petition is racking up signatures. In these tough economic times, people are desperate to pay a dummy tax and now eBay’s robbed them of a convenient outlet to do that.
Sure, there’s still the lottery, but then, a lottery ticket won’t do you any good without the magical powdered tiger testes required to make it a winning lottery ticket. It’s lose, lose, lose across the board.
Ebay, which owns PayPal, is one of the largest auction websites that offers peer-to-peer sales. Last month, the San Jose, Calif., company announced strong second quarter growth: Revenue for the quarter ending June 30, 2012, increased 23 percent to $3.4 billion, compared with the same period the previous year.
The company, whose market cap is more than $58 billion, still has a ton of unusual offerings, ban or no ban on the occult. For $3.5 million, a Florida man is selling the “American Dream,” which includes everything he owns. And a glob of glue that looks like Homer Simpson’s face went for more than $200,000 last January.