Amazon and eBay ban listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks – “No place for price gouging”

Amazon as pulled thousands of listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks as online retailers are fighting to crack down on profiteers cashing in on people’s anxieties about coronavirus.

According to N.Y. Times, Amazon has “suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they’d lose their accounts.”

The world’s largest online retailer said it had removed “tens of thousands” of listings from its sites around the world, saying there was “no place for price gouging” as staff were constantly monitoring listings.

On March 09, 2020 eBay quickly followed by banning all listings for N95 and N100 masks, hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes.

The auction site will also remove any listing that mentions COVID-19, coronavirus, 2019nCoV (except books) in the title or description.

Amazon removed “tens of thousands” of listings from its sites around the world, saying there was “no place for price gouging” as staff were constantly monitoring listings.

Journalist Jack Nicas wrote in the NYT about two brothers who “took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes…

Read the full feature: He has 17,700 bottles of hand-sanitizer and nowhere to sell them