One of the first e-commerce players in the world, eBay, has filed a lawsuit against Amazon for violating the user agreement it had with eBay by stealing its sellers and luring them to sell their goods on Amazon’s website.

According to a Verge report, the first cease and desist letter was sent to Amazon earlier in October. eBay claims that Amazon was using eBay’s messaging feature to poach sellers from eBay to come sell on its own platform.

Giving out the details of how this violation of the user agreement was executed, eBay claims representatives of Amazon got on to the eBay site as account holders and then sent mails to the sellers on eBay to sell their goods on Amazon. eBay states that this was done in such a manner that the mails would simply give out their phone numbers and ask the eBay sellers to call them. This ensured there was no explicit evidence to pin them or Amazon down. The sellers are from different parts of the world; besides the US, they are from Europe and even as far as Singapore and Australia.

The way eBay has described this act by Amazon and its representatives in its lawsuit as an "orchestrated, coordinated, worldwide campaign” and that such luring of the sellers is absolutely illegal.

“For years, and unbeknownst to eBay, Amazon has been engaged in a systematic, coordinated effort to infiltrate and exploit eBay’s proprietary M2M system on eBay’s platform to lure top eBay sellers to Amazon,” eBay said in its complaint according to the Verge report.

No compensation amount has been specified in the lawsuit filed in a court in Santa Clara county, close to where eBay is headquartered. It appears these account holders in eBay said to be representing Amazon had been sending multiple messages to the sellers, but have not concluded any business on the site. This, by itself constitutes a violation, according to eBay.  

Amazon responded to Wall Street Journal saying that it was conducting an investigation.