Tuesday, 31st January 2006 (4919 views)

Jewellery firm Tiffany is suing online auction company eBay for helping sell counterfeit jewellery.

Tiffany also claims that eBay has made large amounts of money through charging fees for counterfeit sales.

Tiffany bought around 200 items from the online auction site in 2004 and says that three out of four of the pieces were fake.

"We never take possession of the goods sold through eBay, and we don't have any expertise," an eBay spokesman said.

"We're experts at building a marketplace and bringing buyers and sellers together."

Ina Steiner, the editor of AuctionBytes.com, told the New York Times: "eBay makes a lot of money from a lot of small unhappy transactions."

"If you've lost a few thousand dollars, you might go the extra mile to recover it. But if you've lost $50 or $20, you may never be able to prove your case, and in the meantime eBay has gotten the listing fee and the closing fee on that transaction."

If Tiffany wins its case, which is set to begin before the end of the year, a deluge of similar lawsuits is expected.

Sales at high-end jeweller Tiffany increased by six per cent in the US during the Christmas period, the company revealed earlier this month.

The firm saw sales increase during November and December to $712 million worldwide, as consumers spent more per transaction than at the same time the previous year.

Demand for high-end jewellery such as gold continues to be strong and Tiffany announced in December that rising values had not put customers off; instead the price increases had helped the jeweller to push up profits.

In its US market, the largest increase came in the company's sale of items of over $50,000, highlighting the strength of the high-end jewellery market at present.

 

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