Don’t Mention the S Word: The Conclusion of the eBay Saga

I previously recounted, here and here, the tale of how I set myself up on eBay, listed my own perfume, and was promptly informed that I appeared to be infringing my own intellectual property rights.

This was awkward, because I am both the perfumer and the rights owner of Spiritus Florum, and I had not, to the best of my knowledge, recently taken legal action against myself.

After several emails, multiple customer-service advisers, one request to contact them from a different email address, another request to provide the item number they were discussing with me, and the general sensation of being trapped inside an administrative escape room, I got a call this morning from a genuinely lovely guy who explained what had actually happened.

It wasn’t a counterfeit problem at all. It was a cosmetics-policy problem.

There’s an episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil Fawlty gets a head injury while a group of Germans are staying at the hotel, repeatedly tells himself not to mention the war, and then proceeds to talk about almost nothing else.

eBay appears to have a similar relationship with the word “sample.”

Don’t mention the sample.

I mentioned it once, but I absolutely did not get away with it.

The curious thing is that eBay is full of 2 ml fragrances. I can find them. I can buy them. Some are even available from overseas sellers and can be shipped quite happily to the UK. But when I try to list my own original 2 ml presentation, I get a very definite ‘computer says no.’

I tried “mini perfume.”

Nope.

“Travel size.”

Ye shall not pass.

I briefly considered “lilliputian full bottle,” but by that point I was beginning to suspect there was no wording whimsical enough to convince the machine that a 2 ml bottle made and sold by the brand itself was not somebody crouching in a shed with a funnel and a bottle of Creed Aventus.

The apparent problem is eBay’s rule that perfumes must be sold in their original container, which is sensible enough if you’re trying to stop people pouring fragrance from retail bottles into miscellaneous atomisers and flogging them as official products, but less useful when the person listing the perfume is also the person who made the perfume, chose the bottle, filled the bottle and owns the brand.

There may be some secret sequence of words that causes the catch to release. Gandalf had an easier time getting through the Doors of Durin.

The shame of it is that I want people to try Rhapsody in Violet before buying a full bottle. That’s what my sample credit programme is for, and why I spent a fair chunk of money on branded 2 ml packaging in the first place. Perfume is personal, and making a perfume everyone loves is impossible. You should not have to buy a full bottle of a perfume to discover it isn’t to your tastes.

So I did the obvious experiment, for science.

I removed the 2 ml option entirely and listed only the 50 ml bottle. That was accepted immediately.

Apparently 48 extra millilitres are the difference between “welcome to eBay” and “foul decanter, ye shall be cast out.”

The 50 ml listing is therefore now live, and anyone who wants to try Rhapsody first will hopefully find their way here or to Etsy.

As for eBay, I am going to leave the listing alone and avoid making sudden movements. If anything else happens to it, I may simply accept that the platform and I have incompatible temperaments.

There is, after all, only so much of one’s life that should be spent forensically examining perfectly ordinary nouns in case they trigger a listing bot.

I half expect to wake up tomorrow and discover that the 50 ml bottle has been removed for contravention of the Insufficiently Upbeat Policy, the Excessive Violet Act 2024, or perhaps some obscure regulation concerning suspicious levels of iris.

For now, though, Rhapsody in Violet is finally on eBay.

Just don’t mention the S word.