Sellers misrepresent the materials used in certain items, and sometimes use ‘code words’ to disguise illegal offers, researchers from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent, England, said in a statement on Monday.
“Despite eBay’s strict policies regarding animal and game products, there is still an ongoing trade in ivory, mostly concealed from other non-restricted materials,” David Roberts said in a statement.
He said it can be difficult to detect illegal sales of ivory objects as the word ‘ivory’ can be used to describe a color. But ‘companies like eBay have the means and data’ that can be used to tackle the illegal game trade, Roberts added.
An eBay spokesman said the company is a founding member of the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online and works with the World Wildlife Fund and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
“We have global teams focused on maintaining standards in our market, and over a recent two-year period, we have blocked or removed more than 265,000 listings that are prohibited by our Animal Products Policy,” the eBay spokesman said in a statement to CNN Business.
But Roberts told CNN Business that he would like to see independent verification of the listing data, adding that he and other researchers have had limited success in getting illegal listings taken down using eBay’s reporting feature.
Roberts and co-researcher Sofia Venturini found that some descriptions of netsuke – carved objects often made of elephant ivory and attached to Japanese kimonos – misrepresent the items.
According to researchers, lists of netsuke made from elephant ivory are often described as bone, which could identify ivory items by checking images of the products for Schreger lines – a unique pattern found on the material.
Only 1.3% to 6.9% of the ivory netsuke items were removed by eBay when researchers re-examined the listings after a month. More than 50% were sold, while half of the unsold examples were renamed.
“If eBay had applied its policy effectively to ivory … these items would have been removed,” researchers said.
Roberts praised sites like Etsy and Preloved as a ‘fantastic job’ restricting the sale of items related to the illegal wildlife trade. “If other businesses can definitely do it, so can eBay,” he added.
The article by the researchers was published in the journal Tropical Conservation Science.