Someone's copied bits of my listing on ebay.

[SophiesDog]

Very similar item and not very common in the UK, mine's been on for less than a week and has a lot of watchers.

Theirs is a worse version on at a fifth of the price, but similar, and they have basically stolen about three different long sentences I have used to describe mine, and bunged them into their description.

I have sent a friendly message saying 'nice item, did you mean to copy bits of my listing word for word?!' Best wishes, etc.

Bit nervous now...but honestly how hard is it to write your own bloody description?

I can understand it approximately, but given that I am selling, and (as you said up thread) I want to come across well, I'm not risking my poor spelling and grammar.

If they complained, I would take it down, but I really hadn't considered the fact that they might complain!

I better watch out, I always nick descriptions of what I'm selling from online. I recently sold a cross trainer and took the description from Argos

It's just a description

Agreed

People do judge ebay sellers by the things SophiesDog described. DH buys stuff from ebay quite often - not clothes, or cheap crap, but musical instruments and equipment. He will totally judge the seller by the description, and will almost certainly buy from the one whose copy he finds most humourous if there's a choice of two similar items.

If I buy from ebay, which I don't very often, I will usually buy the cheapest instance of whatever it is, but I won't be spending over a tenner, and so I don't much care about how the description's worded so long as it's clear.

Your post comparing the two descriptions just came across as really snobby, Sophie. Only people with perfect grammar are reliable and trustworthy?

And I promise this isn't an example of "competitive...anti-snobbery" (Sophiesdog, Mumsnet 2015)

I know that the other person has changed theirs now but if I was buying an expensive unusual item and there were 2 with identical descriptions I'd be suspicious and wonder if there was some kind of dodgy connection between the two and it would put me off bidding on either of them.