The Off-Platform Contact Rule: What Gets Recorded, and What Three Strikes Costs You
Asking a buyer to continue the conversation elsewhere is not a warning-letter offence here. It writes a row against your account, blocks the message, and at the third row it switches the account off. Here is the whole mechanism and what it has actually done.
Most marketplace policies about off-platform dealing are written as warnings. This one is written as code, and it runs on every message you send. It is worth understanding as a mechanism rather than as a position, because the mechanism does things a warning does not: it counts, and it acts on the count without anyone reviewing your case first.
What is being scanned, and when
Text is checked for a request to move the conversation off the platform at the point you submit it, in several places: opening a ticket with a seller, replying inside one, the subject line as well as the body, a seller's reply from the admin side, and the free-text reason on a dispute.
When a check trips, the submission does not go through. The text is not quietly stripped and the message is not held for review. You get an error, the message is lost, and a row is written against your account.
Two side effects follow immediately. Your ability to post into tickets is blocked for the next hour, and that block extends rather than resets if you trip it again. And an alert goes to the platform's own support queue containing the full text of what you wrote, your current strike count, and your level.
A small number of accounts are exempted from the scan entirely, which is a deliberate setting rather than a reward for volume.
The count is per account and it does not expire
Every trip writes a row. The rows are counted over the lifetime of the account, not over a rolling window, and nothing in the system removes them. At three, the account is set inactive with a stated reason naming the contact policy.
Two exemptions apply to that final step and they are narrow: administrator accounts, and accounts that are already inactive. Being a trusted supplier does not exempt you from the three-strike line, even though it does exempt you from the hourly posting block and from the scan itself. If the scan is running against your messages, the count is running too.
What the records actually show
Measured across the full violation log, from January to the end of August 2026:
- 375 recorded events, all of one type: a request to exchange contact details.
- 271 of them, roughly seven in ten, came from inside a ticket. The remainder come from ticket creation, from the seller-side reply route and from dispute reason text.
- 166 distinct accounts have at least one. Split by role: 97 sellers, 68 buyers, and one administrator.
- By event rather than by account, sellers account for 268 of the rows and buyers for 99. This is not a rule that only buyers trip.
- Most offenders trip once. 105 accounts have exactly one row and 24 have two. 37 accounts sit at three or more, and the tail is long: single accounts hold 14, 22 and 28 rows.
One number needs stating honestly rather than dressing up. Only one account currently carries the automatic deactivation reason, not 37. The automatic step was added at the end of August 2026 and it fires at the moment a new row is written. There is no backfill, so accounts that crossed three before it shipped were not swept retroactively. The line is enforced from here, and the 37 accounts already over it are one message away from it.
Suspended shop and disabled account are not the same thing
This distinction decides whether your money is reachable, and an earlier version of this page got it wrong in the direction that hurts.
A suspended shop stops your listings appearing to buyers. Your account is untouched. You can still sign in, read your orders, and request a withdrawal as normal. A paused-ordering setting behaves the same way for listing visibility.
A disabled account is different. Every authenticated request is refused, and the withdrawal route checks the flag a second time on its own and refuses again. So while the account is off, you cannot request a payout, and there is no self-service route to reverse it.
The three-strike contact rule produces the second state, not the first. Anyone telling you that your earnings stay withdrawable through this particular rule is describing the wrong action. Settled balance is not confiscated, and a payout already sent is already sent, but reaching it requires the account to be turned back on, which is a support decision and not a guaranteed one.
Your listings are scanned too, separately
A second system reads listing titles, descriptions, FAQs and variant text for the same thing, on a rolling schedule with a per-listing cooldown of about a day and a daily batch limit. Roughly a quarter of the catalogue has been through it so far.
What it does is worth being precise about, because it is often described as an automatic takedown and it is not. The scan sets a flag. A person decides whether the listing comes down. There is an explicit false-alarm action that clears the flag, restores the listing and marks the exact wording clean so the same copy does not trip again. Currently 21 listings carry the flag and none of them is still live.
The practical consequence for a seller: a contact detail buried in a variant description is enough to get the listing looked at, and rewriting that line is enough to clear it.
Why the rule exists in this form
Once a deal leaves the platform there is no order record, so there is nothing to arbitrate with when it goes wrong. The buyer usually comes back anyway, and what they come back with is a dispute against an unrelated on-platform order, which support then has to settle on incomplete evidence. Chargebacks raised against payments the platform never processed still land on the platform's payment accounts.
The evenness matters as much as the rule. Enforcement here is a count on an account, evaluated the same way for every account, with no branch anywhere in it for sales volume, tenure or trust status. A high-volume seller and a first-week seller reach three by the same route. Communities that host this kind of trade restrict direct dealing for the same reason, which is that a marketplace that quietly exempts its largest sellers stops being one.
The platform charges no per-order commission to sellers. It is not free: withdrawals carry a percentage fee. But there is no per-sale cut to avoid by taking a deal off-platform, which is the assumption most off-platform pitches are built on.
If you have already tripped it
- Check your own count. Every event generated an alert, and support can tell you where you stand. Assume it is higher than you remember, because the count never resets.
- Do not retry the message. A second attempt is a second row and it extends the hour-long block rather than restarting it.
- Take the contact detail out of your listing copy, including variant descriptions and FAQ answers. That is where the listing scanner reads.
- If a listing was flagged in error, say so. The false-alarm route exists, restores the listing, and stops the same wording tripping again.
- If the account is already off, withdrawal is not available until it is back on. Contact support directly rather than through a ticket, since ticket posting is exactly what the block prevents.
Frequently Asked Questions
Three. The count is per account, covers the whole life of the account, and nothing removes rows from it. Administrator accounts and accounts that are already inactive are the only exemptions at that step. Being a trusted supplier does not exempt you from it.
No. Suspending a shop only removes your listings from buyer-facing pages; the account itself still works, so sign-in, order history and withdrawal requests are all unaffected. A disabled account is a different state, and in that state the withdrawal route refuses the request outright.
It is refused, not filtered. The contact detail is not stripped and the message is not held for a moderator, so the text is lost and you have to write it again without the request. Your ticket posting is also blocked for the following hour, and a repeat extends that block rather than restarting it.
No. Across the full log, roughly two thirds of the accounts with a record are sellers and one third are buyers, and one administrator account appears. By event count sellers hold the larger share, but the rule is enforced in both directions and buyers asking a seller to move the deal elsewhere are recorded the same way.
Yes. The automatic scan only raises a flag; a person decides what happens next, and there is an explicit false-alarm action that clears the flag, puts the listing back and records the exact wording as clean so identical copy will not trip again. Check variant descriptions and FAQ answers, since the scan reads those as well as the main description.
It cannot. The evaluation reads a count of rows against the account and a small list of exemptions, and sales volume, tenure and trust status appear nowhere in it. Trusted status does exempt you from the scan itself, but if the scan is running on your messages then the count is running too.
