What is VeRO?

The acronym VeRO stands for the Verified Owners Rights Program and is a program created by Ebay to protect intellectual property rights of third parties. Among other things intellectual property rights include copyrights, patents, trademarks, brand names, and licenses.

Should a VeRo member feel their rights have been violated, VeRO acts as a mechanism to report this to Ebay. Ebay will then arbitrarily remove the listing and refund the listing fees to the seller. It is the responsibility of the seller to contact the VeRO complainant for any further resolution. Ebay will not, apparently, involve themselves in a VeRo complaint other than to notify the seller that the listing has been removed. In fact, according to their policy " eBay cannot require rights owners to provide you with the exact reason for the removal of your listing. However, we do require that they provide you with an email address to contact them directly".

Ebay does, however, publish a rather extensive list of VeRO members About Me pages on this page. They all seem to give a varying degrees of information regarding their property rights, with some but not all offering contact information. Another possible resource is the Ebay Guidelines for Creating Legally Compliant Listings.

Basically, if you feel your listing was removed in error, it is up to you to contact the rights owner. If the rights owner agrees and is willing to contact Ebay to that effect, then and only then will Ebay allow reinstatement of your listing.

There have been many posts on the Ebay Community Boards over the years regarding sellers who have had listings removed for VeRO violation with no idea why. No doubt there will be more in the future. It would seem that with regard to VeRO, the only sensible advisement is "let the seller beware".