Why eBay Turns the Cheek when it comes to Vape Sellers

It’s simple, money, and young users of their mobile apps. If you read part one of this series you would already know that eBay allows sellers of nicotine products such as vape juice even though it is clearly against TOS, local, state laws and even national laws.

So what exactly are sellers getting away with? Vape equipment includes anything related to the device that converts the vape liquid to a vapor inhalable form. From Mods to Tanks, RDAs etc to batteries and wire, anything that can be a part of one of these devices is considered by the FDA to be “for nicotine use” and therefore regulated. This is important because eBay defers definition of prohibited items to the FDA definition, thus these devices violate eBay TOS as Prohibited Items.

Sellers of Vape devices like to hide their wares in the “other gadget” category under “electronics”. This is nice because they can get the electronic category discount if they have an eBay store upgrade.

Over the past 30 days the top 3 sellers in this category was a vape device, the Smok Alien Kit. Another device called Volcano made 4 of 6 top items vape or ‘tobacco’ (read marijuana) related.

Overall it appears that the US market for devices is larger than for liquids/juices. Nearly every device in the top 100 sellers in gadgets are vape related. Pretty sad on eBay’s part. (willful negligence?)

Again like in part 1 this research was simple and identifying the 100 largest sellers of vape products on ebay would take less than 1 day.

Out of the top 151 products in the gadget category the vape devices consist of sales approaching 1mm over the previous 30 day span.

Is eBay scared they are going to lose are large demographic if they enforce thier TOS? If they do enforce TOS will it negatively effect shareholders?

part 3 paypal coming up soon