>Yes it is a huge problem ,  but is straight away solved by recognizing,  if you could not use a phone, (so for a moment place yourself there )  , that the requirement you are seeing, is not to stop , your right to provision of those goods and services different to those who can use a phone. Are you able to edit your above statement/sentence so it makes a bit more grammatical sense? That way I can see what you're trying to get at and address it accordingly as I think I agree for the most part, but can't be completely sure.I do object to the requirement for cellphones to be used to sign up f...

It absolutely is standard across almost all E-Commerce platforms, as I stated above. Trade Me is an exception for most cases.The opinion "should not be expected" is only that - an opinion. I'm not sticking up for Trade Me, as their system is flawed in many ways, but they are far more liberal than most E-Commerce sites are in this matter.I can't think of a single transaction I've carried out over the past few years where I haven't been required to enter a phone number. 

Meanwhile, multiple sellers constantly add their phone numbers to comments, or even the listing itself, with total impunity, while honest people have to carry out the above workarounds.

It's pretty standard across most (I don't want to assume all) E-Commerce sites that use any kind of courier service to enter a phone number in the appropriate field to complete a purchase at the checkout. This is the case both internationally and here, and if anything, Trade Me is extremely liberal in that the platform doesn't require sellers to demand this from buyers.

Ash - Callum described it in slightly more detail a couple of comments up ^^^

By the way - It would be nice, annoying as the current system is for Ash, if the system similarly blocked questions that contain phone numbers, and got good at doing so. Unfortunately this is very difficult to do.  I just had to reply to a question on one of my listings now to not circumvent rules by giving phone numbers as part of questions. Unfortunately I replied by mistake, when I'd meant to add a comment. Annoyance does this sometimes. To make it even worse, the guy was just requesting a photograph of something. He could have just easily requested that I upload one and add it to the li...

Gary - That's not particularly intuitive. One of the principles of E Commerce is lowering "friction". "Friction" is any mouse movement, click, extra page, or other step that gets in the way of you going from Point A to Point B. While this is normally related to getting the customer from the Front Page (Point A) to the Checkout with their credit card in hand (Point B), it can also be interpreted when speaking about functionality at large, to reducing the amount of messing about. What Trade Me had was not broken. You could scroll and find the listing within a split second sometimes. Adding an...

Just be grateful that you can see questions! I know that you can be notified when somebody asks, but currently, on the new version of the site, just scrolling through the current listings section, it doesn't show you listings that have questions on them like the old site used to. Ash - There may be a reason for the workarounds as opposed to fixes. Are you familiar with the concept of spaghetti code?

Hi Deborah - This may not solve your listing visibility problem, but are you currently using My Products? This is one of the truly genius functionalities that Trade Me has had for years that allows you to maintain listings, toggle them on and off, and keep details without having to re upload listings. For situations like yours, it also allows you to keep track of what's currently a live listing or not. You may already be using it, but if you're not, it's worth looking at.