So go on then, lets see the words you'd use to put this into practice ? Words that will unambiguously catch the likes of eBay and Amazon, but not catch the others who you said are definitely different.
Not my area of expertise.
As a private landlord, I don't want to be help responsible if one of my tenants starts selling drugs from the house - it's in the tenancy agreement that the property cannot be used for trade, illegal, or immoral activities.
Another false analogy.
The correct one would be that you have rented a property to someone who is selling things from it, and you have 100% visibility of every single thing he sells. You know what they are, You know how much he sold them for. You know to the second when he sold them, and to whom. You collect the money from his customers for him, and pass it on to him less your fee for processing the payments. As part of the rental agreement you also invoice him for fees based on the value of his sales. You collect full details of everything he has for sale and publicise them widely so that you can provide a way for his potential customers to find him.
PS - you do know that neither of them is a UK company don't you ? And that under EU legislation, the UK cannot do anything whatsoever to stop a company based in another EU country from trading in the UK.
Nonsense - of course they can, and they do, all the time.
Oh yes, and here's another viewpoint. My employer does online shops (amongst other things). It varies by customer, but most will involve us designing the web pages, building the database etc, writing the code to make it all work (and integrating with payment processors), and hosting the whole lot when it's built.
So are you proposing that we also have to go out and check what our customers are selling ?
Possibly.
Ah, the usual retort of someone who knows their arguments don't stand up.
No - the retort of someone who is beginning to realise that he is attempting to reason with someone who is either willfully refusing to listen to reason or is genuinely to thick to understand it.
No, but lets say they are in (say) the Trafford Centre. I'd expect the retailer to have done done due diligence, but I wouldn't expect the owners/managers of the Trafford Centre to have their own "product police" going round doing random testing etc.
But they should, and if they cannot provide retail space without facilitating criminal acts then they should be shut down.
I look forward to seeing how you are going to write the rules that make them responsible, without doing the usual trick of punishing everyone else for the sins of the few.
It would not bother me in the slightest if they had to be shut down because they cannot be rsed to stamp out criminal traders.
A more realistic analogy would be if Sainsbury allowed someone to open a concession selling sausages under the butcher's own name within their store.
In which case I absolutely would all on Sainsbury to carry out the same level of diligence on that butchers product as they would do if some random meat factory offered to supply them with sausages for them to sell themselves.
Well then, how about going to the authorities with your arguments, and persuade them to clamp down on eBay ?
There would be no point - they would be as pathetically impotent as you with regard to believing that anything
should be done, let alone actually doing it.
IF it can be shown that they have failed to enforce their Ts&Cs rigorously then there are in fact laws that can hold them liable. I very much doubt that it could be shown. I've certainly heard of people having their accounts frozen (or even removed) for allegedly breaking some rule or other
I have lost count of the number of times I have reported listing violations to eBay and they have done absolutely nothing about them.
The same applies to counterfeits - they do police and block sales of goods purporting to be <some famous brand>, over zealously according to some reports I'seen where they've blocked sales of genuine second hand articles.
Oh yes - they will look after the financial interests of other big businesses. They DGAS about individual consumers.
Do they just block all sales of electrical items - because that is the only 100% sure way of controlling it ?
At the moment they are profiting from facilitating a 0% sure way of controlling it.
