So no sooner than I set up the eBay store to sell Corante ads (which I thought was a cool idea), I get my personal eBay account suspended for being a shill, and eBay takes all the inventory out of the store -- which took me hours to set up and populate.

What happened is an obvious transition issue. I was setting up the store on one hand, and starting to put inventory in it, when a couple of big advertisin sales came through -- ones that had been conducted in the old fashioned "via email" form of sales.

So, I looked in the store management controls and there is no way to retire inventory as being sold but not through eBay. You can end the sale, but it goes into the database as unsold.

So I bought all the weeks of ads that had been purchased by my clients via my eBay account. What I should have done, in retrospect, was to ask my advertisers to log on and do it, but it was Saturday, and I wanted to straighten the store up so I could announce it on Monday.

Also, these ads were all listed at a fixed price, not as an auction, so I wasn't in some way bidding up the price.

It also turns out that eBay used to allow store owners to do what I did, in the past, but it was a abused, and they changed their policies.

The thing that is most annoying is getting a series of emails within a two hour period: the first warning me about "shill" practices, and suggesting I read the policies and refrain from such activities -- all this stuff took place last weekend, note -- and then immediately followed by a suspending of my account, and then the pulling of all my remaining inventory from my store.

And now, since there is basically no way to call eBay on the phone, I have to wait a few days to get a response to the emails I have sent along.

Ugh.