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Dodging Recalls with Resales

Online Auctions Can Keep Bad Products On Market

By Martin H. Bosworth
ConsumerAffairs.com

December 6, 2005

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Although it misses thousands of dangerous products each year, the process for conducting safety recalls in the U.S. is straightforward. A company puts out a notice stating their item is defective, and consumers lucky enough to see the notice trade in the defective product while retailers pull unsold units off the shelves.

But in the world of online auctions and sales, defective products stay in circulation long after a recall notice. Children, in particular, can be at risk from unsafe products being picked up at an online sale.

Yet, knowing this, hugely-profitable auction sites like eBay and Amazon apparently do nothing to pre-screen items being listed on their sites, even though their powerful databases could easily cross-match sale items with the government's list of recalled products.

After we found a recalled lead-contaminated lunch box still on sale at eBay, we did a little more digging to match items being auctioned with those on our children's products recall page.

A simple eBay search quickly turned up two matches that happened to be available on the day we checked.

First there was the Jumpking Trampoline, the target of multiple recall notices from 1999 through 2004 for bad construction of the trampolines and their enclosures.

We found what appears to be one of the recalled models fetching a rather pricey bid of $398.

The seller claims it's new, but the only way to be certain is to ask the model number and date of manufacture. To do that, you have to sign up for an account with eBay. A simple process, to be sure, but shouldn't that be advertised in the sale description itself?

Isn't it the seller's responsibility to be aware that a product they're auctioning has been recalled?

Yes, but there are problems with the recall process. recall notices often don't reach many consumers because of the complexity and time involved in identifying and tracking down defective products, not to mention that companies with recalled products often don't put forth a truly "good faith" effort to ensure the notice gets out.

So what about eBay, and other auction sites like it? How much responsibility do they have for ensuring unsafe products aren't sold on their watch?

Buyer Beware

Mark Ross, spokesperson for the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), says that buying from online auction sites is "the same as buying from any secondhand store…if you're concerned that a product is going to be recalled or has been recalled, check with our Web site."

The CPSC has worked with sites such as eBay and Amazon.com to remove recalled items from their listings.

"We have a team of people in the field that monitor online auction sites…they're usually removed in three days." Of course, there are, in Ross' words, "hundreds or thousands of shopping sites" out there, so it's "hard to find everything."

In other words, the CPSC spends taxpayer money to try to track down products that should not be sold in the first place, letting eBay, Amazon and the others completely off the hook.

Although Ross claims that the CPSC has a "good working relationship" with eBay, he could not explain precisely how their system of alerting each office to the auctioning of recalled products worked.

Calls to eBay seeking comment for this article were not returned.

Given the huge popularity of eBay, Amazon, and other resale sites, it's not surprising that most shoppers don't place responsibility for policing recalled products with the vendor. Joseph B., a software architect from Alexandria, VA, sees eBay purely as an intermediary.

"eBay is essentially a distributor used for the sale of millions of products every year by individual buyers and sellers," he says. "Any requirement that it filter out defective products would subject it to too high a risk of liability and would put an unacceptable chill on the interstate and international commerce enabled by the site."

Mike K., a firearms instructor and eBay seller from Gold Canyon, AZ, agrees. "Responsibility and liability for defective and/or dangerous products should be with the seller and with the purchaser. The seller is responsible for providing the product; the buyer is responsible for knowing what he or she is purchasing."

Not Everyone Agrees

"That is complete nonsense," said James R. Hood, President and Editor in Chief of ConsumerAffairs.com. "eBay and other auction sites have a moral if not a legal responsibility to put forth a least a minimal effort to avoid selling products that kill or maim hapless consumers and their children."

"It is an outrage that scarce taxpayer dollars must be spent cleaning up after their digital rummage sales. eBay paints itself as an innovative community-builder but doesn't do much to ensure that the community it's building is safe," Hood said.

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