What Are eBay Stealth Accounts?

today we're talking all about eBay stealth accounts what they are when you might need them when you don't need them and how they could potentially help your eBay business what's up everyone paul here from

dropshipping titans dot-com where I teach regular people just like you how to start successful dropshipping businesses and in this video we're talking all about eBay stealth accounts which is something that might be relevant not only to dropshippers but every eBay seller out there so let's first kind of explain what stealth accounts are so this all starts when you create your first eBay account ever I'll put it right here as number one now you're gonna be going along selling doing fine most people stick with one account for a while which is actually what I recommend as well but all your focus here for a while but eventually there's gonna come a time when you're going to want to create a second eBay account and that is totally allowed so if we come into my computer and we see on eBay there is the multiple accounts policy it says we understand that eBay members might want different accounts for buying or selling or to focus on different product lines and that's totally fine they totally allow this and actually encourage it in many ways now the thing is when you create a second account eBay actually links these two accounts together they know that you own both accounts and how do they know that well there's a lot of different ways they do some of the different ways are like your IP address they also potentially look at the cookies on your browser they also look at some obvious things like your phone number or your address different identifying information like that if any of that matches up or enough of it matches up they link the two accounts together which is fine because eBay allows you to have multiple accounts in fact it's actually beneficial because if you've been working with account number one and doing well with it you probably have a higher limit on that account a higher selling limit and if you start a second account eBay is going to give you a higher limit on that second account higher than most new accounts get so most new sellers start out with a low limit but if you create a second account that second accounts going to have a much higher limit than if it was a brand-new account for a new seller so sometimes it's actually good when these accounts get linked up so I've had now within this kind of ecosystem three accounts basically so I have my main account which is kind of my oldest one and the one I always used to focus on the most then had a second one that I used to used with different suppliers I would have it on sometimes off sometimes on and off that account and my third account which is only to use for making YouTube videos actually it's a completely different account there now this is all fine but the problem comes in when this happens let's say one of your accounts get suspended or it gets banned now there is a difference between a temporary suspension and a permanent ban and I've explained that in a video I've done before I'll try to link it up above if you want to check out that video later on but just know that if your account gets suspended or banned eBay is probably going to suspend and banned all the counts that are linked up with that one so think about that if you get permanently banned from eBay all your accounts get shut down and even if you try to start another account eBay will instantly link it up and that account will get banned as well so how do you sell on eBay if you've been banned or if you've been suspended and can't get that suspension lifted and that's where stealth accounts come in so think of it like this you create a wall right here and on the other side of this wall you create your stealth account with completely new information so that eBay doesn't know that you own this stealth account therefore even if you're banned this account still keeps running so obviously the first type of people who would want to create a stealth account are people who have been banned in the past and now can't sell on eBay and are looking for a way to get started again stealth accounts the solution for you but there are other people who might also want to create stealth accounts so you a stealth account if you are like me and you like to run different experiments on stores so I had my main account it was doing fine but I wanted to try some new things that maybe were a little bit riskier and I thought hey if I'm trying these risky things then that account that I'm running those experiments on might get banned and I don't want to get this account banned because it's going to ban all my accounts so I created a stealth account actually I created a couple different stealth accounts because I did it wrong in the beginning but eventually figured it out created a stealth account and I ran some experiments on it those experiments if they went bad and this account got suspended or banned these accounts never would have been banned and these accounts aren't banned so there they're fine right now but if this account had a problem all these accounts would have been fine what ended up happening actually was that my experiments did well this accounts actually outperforming the other ones so now this has become my main account so now I do my experiments on this account so that if anything bad happens to this account my best account is totally fine now along that same vein other people might also want to create stealth accounts to spread out their risk so let's say you're selling well on eBay and it's become your full-time income now or a major source of income for you and you've heard horror stories about people who have been banned from eBay and you are afraid that overnight eBay might ban you and then all of a sudden your entire source of income is gone so what those people do is they create multiple stealth accounts each one that is completely separate from the other therefore if something happens to one account the other accounts are fine and they can just then kind of shift focus to those other ones it kind of spreads out your risk now eBay doesn't allow this at all so if you go through this page right here it says that while you are allowed to have multiple accounts you are not allowed to register an account to avoid different restrictions or limits or other policy consequences so it's definitely not allowed which is kind of why it has that sneaky name stealth accounts but it is something that people do and that people do really well and it is part of people's strategy for selling on eBay so most likely you're not going to need a stealth account you would only really need it if you fit one of the criteria I mentioned before and like I mentioned before I really encourage you to focus on one store right when you start now for myself like I said I've had a couple of stealth accounts now but really I just have the one that is currently active because the other ones like I kind of messed up on so I have the one which is doing well and it's been going well for a while now at least six months and is outperforming the other ones so I'm going to pause this video right now and actually come back and record the second part of it in a few weeks maybe a month through now I want to start more stealth accounts to understand the process better and hopefully to see that this account is going fine and that these experiments don't impact this account at all either so I'll light I'll check in with you guys in about a month's time or maybe a little bit more and let you know how that's going what I've learned from creating more stealth accounts all right

so it's been about six months since I recorded the first part of this video but I wanted to give myself plenty of time to play with the stealth accounts or I shouldn't even say play with them actually use them I've been using my stealth accounts successfully and effectively and I know that they're working that they are completely isolated from my old eBay account because what I did with that I wasn't really even using anyway I ran an experiment on it that account actually got suspended and as soon as that account got suspended I got emails on all my old eBay accounts telling me that all those accounts had been suspended but I did not get that email on my stealth accounts were totally fine which means that they worked they did what they were supposed to do so really happy and excited that they work that way and by the way I did get that old account back up and running or rather got this suspension lifted just kind of to see what the process is like to get an account unsuspended so if you guys want to hear about how I did that and learn leave a comment down below letting me know and I'll make a video actually explaining how I did it but the more important thing here is that the stealth accounts worked they're effective on being successful with them and I've learned a lot about stealth accounts since I recorded the first part of this video so this video is part one of a series that I'm going to do about stealth accounts so if you want to see the next part in the series make sure to subscribe to the channel and also if you're watching this later check in the comments section because if the part two video the next part in the series is available I'll have it linked up down below for you to check it out otherwise if you got some value out of this video I would appreciate it if you smash the like button down below again subscribe to the channel for the whole series about stealth accounts and then let me know in the comments section if you want to see that video about how I got my account on suspended now I know some of you gonna ask somes gonna throw it in right here what experiment did I run on my old account what god is suspended so this is what I did on that old account I stopped uploading tracking numbers instead I message buyers and said hey here's her tracking number eBay is not working I'm not able to upload the tracking numbers directly and the reason I did that was because there's some speculation that if we have a lease say an item is located in this zip code but we ship from another one that eBay lowers us in the search results for that and I kind of wanted to test that theory by not uploading tracking numbers because if I don't upload tracking numbers eBay won't know that I shipped from a different zip code that was my theory now for a few months it actually worked but I didn't see any benefit to it eBay it wasn't like I was being raised in the search results I didn't see any benefit to it and then the account actually got suspended so I wouldn't recommend you do that I think that's a bad idea eBay even though they technically say you don't need tracking numbers they do want them so do make sure that you upload tracking numbers all right I want to throw that in there because I know some of you would ask but otherwise again guys thanks so much for watching the video and I'll see you in the next one bye for now