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E-Bay Going After Offline Deals
bmongar writes: "It seems that eBay is going after sellers that make contact with people who bid on their items who were not the winners. They want those companies to sell only to those people through eBay. ZDNet is running the story It seems to me that is only likely to discourage their best customers their powersellers. I think they may lose more money from this than they loose from offline deals." Sites like eBay operate on a surprising amount of trust -- I've had happy deals there, and an unhappy scam experience, too. Raise one pinky if you think they can really do much about offline sales, though.
If you've got an item for sale, build your customer base from people who bid on eBay auctions, and sell direct instead of via auction, then guess what? EBay doesn't get any money!
I've heard a few tales recently of sellers who were warned by eBay for listing their websites in their auction listings. They were allowed to link to their own sites, but disallowed from tagging the link with anything that mentioned that merchandise was available for sale on the site. So, "Visit www.junkforsuckers.com for more SUPER-RARE L@@K! trinkets!" at the end of an auction garnered a warning.
It's the same story as a lot of web companies: make things free/cheap/easy at first, to gather a userbase, and then crack down on the rules. Now that eBay is the most popular auction site around, they can afford to do this. I'm not saying that it's wrong either, but it's certainly not about decreasing online fraud -- rather, it's about increasing the bottom line.
> The company also announced that it would crack down on spam, or unsolicited email, sent to members
Obviously eBay's own spam is just fine.
Not only have they been documented spammers for quite some time (reference Dejanews over the past 6 months), they're now resetting members "no, I don't like spam!" settings.
If their crackdown on spam is indicative of their crackdown on offline deals, offline buyers and sellers have nothing to worry about.
(Hey, eBay, you readin' this? I DON'T LIKE SPAM. And calling it "valuable email communications with news, offers and special events" doesn't change the fact that you can't polish a turd. Now go away or I shall taunt your marketroids a second time.)
Although the measures restricting sellers from contacting non-winning bidders probably have some profit motive behind them, there ARE potentially good reasons to advise against it. However, I don't feel its Ebay's place to restrict what two different people do offline. If fraud is rampant between non winning bidders and sellers, a warning to all bidders should be sufficient. This can be displayed whenever a bid is placed. I know, people probably won't read it, but when the call comes in to the fraud dept, Ebay can end the conversation quickly, alhtough they're still not liable for offline transactions anyways.
However, there is no reason a losing bidder can't contact the seller offline, especially if the seller is a legitimate business thats just selling for the purpose of drawing in new customers or selling off surplus/older equipment and features newer equipment offline from ebay. Auctions are very much a buyer beware excersize, but if the buyer is the one inititating the contact, thats good for them, good for the seller, and GOOD FOR EBAY as the seller will keep selling products on ebay because now not only do they pick up the top bidder as a customer, they will also drag in a number of potential customers as well.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
- Do not display high bidder's name until the auction is over at the defined closing time.
- Do not allow everyone to see the bid history of on an item. Only allow the seller to see this, and only after the auction is over.
With these changes, if a seller closes his auction early then he won't know who bid on the item. Also, the trick of looking through the bidding history for completed auctions to locate potential buyers will no longer work.here's the link
eBay cracks down on members' offline deals
I bought a microscope via Ebay (here in Australia, where there aren't many such items up for online auction from local sellers - you don't want to pay shipping from the USA for a cast iron 'scope...).
Or, to put it another way, I _didn't_ buy it via Ebay, because I bid on that 'scope in more than one auction. Each time, I was the winning bidder - at a price well below my maximum bid - but nobody else had a maximum bid very close to mine, so the bid didn't make reserve, and the seller opted not to sell.
So I e-mailed the seller, asked how much they actually WANTED for it, because I actually wanted to buy a microscope and they seemed to be pretty close to the only game in town for the kind of 'scope I wanted, and could afford. They told me the price, it was OK with me, I bought it, Ebay didn't get their cut.
Take me away, officer.
If Ebay want to crack down on fraud then, by all means, they should crack down on fraud. Great idea. But the offline selling rule is not one about fraud, it's one about side-stepping Ebay's revenue-gathering mechanism; various people who sell outside Ebay channels just happen to also be defrauding buyers.
I don't think it's all that likely that offline selling of the sort I participated in really hurts Ebay much, when you _don't_ take fraudulent operators into account. Because, it seems to me, deliberately posting items for sale with unrealistically high reserve prices in order to get off-line buy offers will only let you sell stuff for about as much as the market will bear anyway, but it will greatly cut down the number of people who will actually offer to buy. So I think, overall, it would have to seriously _reduce_ your profits. It's just something that happens now and then when the secret-reserve-price system allows a patient seller to frustrate less patient buyers who just want to BUY the darn thing, but can't, because no other bidder pushed the bid up past reserve for them.
Enforcing some rule against not-bad behaviour because the set of people who are breaking that rule significantly overlaps some other sets of people whose behaviour _is_ bad is the same sort of superficially mathematically sensible but socially unacceptable policy as choosing to arrest black people purely on the grounds of their blackness, because you live somewhere where black people are more likely to have committed crimes than whites.
This may work, for sufficiently small values of "work", but it's still the wrong strategy.
As a note, I am having the feeling that ebay is starting to feel a little bit of pain these days anyway. Prices there have dropped low enough (at least in my area) that I don't really even feel like listing. Perhaps it is the novelty of the "name your price" model wearing off, perhaps it is the slowing in the economy, but the action isn't there currently.
I think it takes three bad deals, but the person of each bad deal has to report it. Just one can too easily be a harrasing thing, but if you get reports from three different people that their deals have gone bad then they yank you.
I think did fine by allowing only finallized sellers & bidders to post feedback because those are official sales that eBay makes money on, and also only official transactions get dispute resolution and bidder insurance.
I thought bids were always retractable, now bid retractions are tracked as part of the user history.
The few times I have accepted a seller offer off eBay's system, without an official item to go along with it, I have done well but I am always cautious because there is often NO RECOURSE if something goes wrong, I have a friend that was suckered by this. The no recourse exposes the buyer to too much risk and since eBay didn't make any money on that transaction, why should they support it?
A more convenient "defer to non-winning bidder" option sounds great.
I know it sounds like money-grubbing on eBays part but there are legitimate non-grubbing reasons why they want to do it.
Between this, and that ridiculous patent, I'm starting to lose quite a bit of respect for eBay. What's next?
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These aren't the droids you're looking for.
They have no legal basis for this at all. You don't sign a deal when you bid on an auction that you can never do buisness with anyone else without using ebay. Sounds to me like ebay is trying to regulate interstate commerce.
When I visit eBay, it's usually because I'm looking to buy something. I want to see people who are honestly trying to sell that given item, not advertisement. Corporations listing items on eBay as promotional stunt just dilute the list of "real" sellers and jack up prices. As far as I'm concerned, we're better off without them.
If you're just an average eBay user, I don't think they're going to crack down on you just because you arranged an off-site sale once. Not only would this generate some obvious bad karma, policing it would be difficult and expensive. The ones who will be affected by this are the fly-by-night companies who consistently place ad-oriented eBay listings. Average users don't have anything to worry about it.
Besides, the servers hosting eBay.com belong to eBay, and they can ban whatever they want from them.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
I've personally have experience with this very issue. Hear me out:
I just recently bid on some Playstation 2's on eBay. Within hours of my bidding I was receiving offers to purchase ps2's via email from those who have gotten my email from the auction pages.
I was interested in a couple of the offers because they were lower in price compared to those being offered directly from ebay's auctions.
So I asked for their reference, aka. their eBay screen names. I wanted to see these sellers' feedbacks.
At the same time this was happening, I was still the highest bidder on one of the ps2 auctions.
Eventually I opted to pay a bit more for an extra level of security and confidence, rather than take a chance with an offline seller.
But it is true, this type of activity has the potential of ruining eBay's reputation, as it encourages bidders to abandon paying for auctions they've won. It can also create distrust in eBay's user feedbacks, as unscrupulous sellers can leverage their high user feedbacks to take advantage of offline buyers, since there's no way for victims of fraud to leave bad feedback for them on eBay's system.
On the other hand, it seems like eBay OWNS the good credit standing of all of their members, disallowing them from using it elsewhere. This isn't fair. Imagine if your good credit, credit that can get you financed for a house, a car, and a business, can be taken away in a second by the credit card companies. How would you feel then?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe I'm missing something here, but if I post an item on ebay, complete the auction and then contact the losing bidders to offer addtional, identical items, how in the hell are they going to know that I did so?
What are they going to do, send their protection racket thugs around to my ISP to insist that all my outgoing mail be routed through their Carnivore-like system scanning for any reference to a business transaction? Or are they going to use shills to contact and entice (read: entrap) buyers and sellers to make offline transactions? "Uh-oh, the ebay police are after me, I guess I'd better turn myself in. You *know* what they can do to you with those fire hoses."
It seems this is all style (well, lack thereof) over substance - smoke and mirrors. Ok, there may be people complaining, but as many people have said here, they don't have a legal leg to stand on. I predict that this will cost far more in ill will and lost customers than it saves in fraud.
Just like the government's unwinnable 'war on drugs', ebay should concentrate on truly fraudulent transactions and the like and not waste their energy on this issue.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
They're not just prohibiting the seller contacting potential buyers, they're prohibiting bidders from contacting the seller offline.
That's right, if you click on that web page link to somebody's store, you're violating eBay policy.
Perhaps their usage policy has changed since I signed up, but I don't remember agreeing to check my First Amendment rights to free speech and free association at the door.
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I've had a LOT of good transactions over Ebay and may have had the first fraudulent one (after several hundred positives) a couple of weeks ago.
Over a two-hour period, a new Ebay seller (who was subsequently yanked from Ebay) sold $56,000 worth of stuff in 60-odd auctions. Some of the people sent money right away via Paypal. Others of us took a wait-and-see attitude. So far, I haven't heard of any one of these people actually receiving the goods.
At least one person's filed a fraud claim.
_Deirdre
Unless ebay plans on hooking up a Carnivore to everyone trading through them, they have no way of possibly preventing this. The article pretty much says as much.
I'll be honest, I've actually purchased something where another seller contacted me after I'd lost another auction on a similar auction. The only way I'd even consider turing someone into Ebay for something like that is if they tried to screw me. The other silly thing is, they really haven't changed the rules, those have always been the rules.
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
I can understand why ebay want's to do this. I've always had good experiences with ebay, but I've gotten emails for "offline" items myself. While I may not blame ebay for getting scammed in an unrelated offline item, the niave may, and it could greatly hurt ebay's reputation - even though they had nothing to do with it.
The only way I can see ebay pulling this off is by hiding all emails except for the highest bidder. If the other bidders have questions for the seller, it would have to go through a web-form that anonymized everything. This, of course, has it's own set of implications.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Is to decrease fraud in offline sales. It seems that a lot of fraud is hapening in these sales, because there isn't the whole post a comment thing. This gives them a way to deal with it. If someone does something that someone thinks is fraud in an offline sale, they can crack down and tell that person not to sell offline any more. It's really just fair warning. I think they know they shouldn't (and won't!) do anything about the majority of offline sellers who don't commit fraud and won't be complained about. Though I still don't think they should do it, I believe it is just standard legal cover-your-ass move.
eBay can't stop private individuals from completing private transactions, regardless of how they came into contact with each other. What if I meet some guy on eBay, we become friends, and two years later he sells me a car. Are they gonna want a cut then?
However, if a seller cancels an auction shortly before the close, then sells the item to whomever was the top bidder, thus bypassing eBay's fees, I think eBay has a right to go after him.
-- russ
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The IHA Forums
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
geez guys, isn't the point of EBay to give people a forum to sell things?
... oops!)
Personally, I think they could take advantage of this: Why don't they add a feature to sell to one of the loosers of the auction?
Here's a really simple example of how to do it: both the seller and the bidder click a little button that says "defer to next highest bidder."
Solves a bunch of problems actually (but will, of course, create new ones). The thing is, I believe that a step in this direction would impress the customer base of EBay and help them greatly. Good PR and all ya know. And I personally think it would be easier to work out the possible problems of this sort of innovation than it would be to go about things the way they are...
JDW
(I accidentally put this in the wrong place the first time
What's to stop you from approaching a losing bidder in a real auction? I don't want to ring the bell of freedom (since you don't necessarily have rights on commercial sites) but it seems overreaching to tell people what they can't do offline. Of course, it all goes back to people blindly clicking "I accept" on large windy user-licenses that take away your rights.
If the winner doesn't get what he wants, he can contact ebay and ebay will shut down the seller's account and ban him from the site? A stricter sign-up system might prevent the villain from coming back. Or ebay might pose as another person trying to buy the item without winning an auction. - All Hail ManowaR.
Someone in eBay has the idea to help stop people from being ripped off from offline deals, originating from an eBay auction. Then the legal dept get a hold of it, and figure the best way to stop people from doing something is to sue them if they do it.
All they have to do is just have a message saying that offline deals might be a good idea, but have none of the protection that eBay offers.
Cheers,
leroy.
If I have an auction, and, for example, it doesent reach the reserve price -
eBay's involvement with the auction ends *there*.
Any further communication between me and any
of the people that bid on that auction is a private
communication and/or transaction, in no way
involved with eBay.
If they think they can
control who I send email to, or who I deal with
outside of their web site, someone there is
smoking some seriously good drugs.
I was contacted by a real sleazebag after I "lost" the bidding on a GeForce2 card. He offered it to me for $190 as a direct purchase. I was a fool and bought it, and got completely jacked out of $190. I paid him with PayPal (via my credit card) and both he and I are verified PayPal users, so I contacted PayPal to get a "fraud investigation" conducted, but as usual the response from customer service is utterly atrocious. I'm working with the credit card company to dispute the purchase, but I may be out the money. Has anyone else had this kind of experience? I think it's reasonable for eBay to crack down on direct seller/buyer transactions to prevent scams. Also, if you have any suggestions as to how I can recover my losses, please contact me! P.S. NEVER, EVER buy something from "comopsomida" on eBay (e-mail address: skorcomputers@yahoo.com) unless you want to lose your money... Comments? reach me @ match1520@hotmail.com
Once enough of their users say "Hey, what's wrong with doing that?" They'll back track and try to make nice. There's not much they could do about it regardless.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
people meet people, however it is done doesn't matter. if someone doesn't want your business or wants to make you feel unwelcome to pay to use their service when it is useful. there are a number of other auction sites who probably don't mind what you do outside of browsing their website.
I _used_ to use ebay a lot.
- We seek not the answers, but to understand the question.
I had two problems with them, and their responses in both cases were inadequate.
I directed them to close my account after someone had tried to change the password, since I was not using it anyway. We had a protracted exchange before they finally agreed to close it. About six months later I received a message from someone wanting to know when he would receive the baseball cards that he had purchased from me. I checked it out and my old account was active, with several card auctions going. I complained to E-Bay and copied the victim in. I never did get a response from E-Bay.
Coincidently, about a week before this there was a fraud attempt on the credit card that E-Bay knew about...
Bother, said Pooh, as he called in an air strike.
I have to say that I have had nothing but good experiences with Ebay and the sellers. I have a few rules about who to buy from - they have to very few negatives, the fewer the better, and the farther back "in time", the better. They have to have a positive rating above 10 (and I read those that are low, to determine if they are a new seller, and had bought 10 things, or if all ten things are sells - which if all are positive, is a good thing). If they have 200 positives, and have had 10 negative comments in the past 30 days, it is a no-sell for me.
Out of over 40 transactions, I have only had one go bad on me, and that was when I was selling - someone didn't send me the money after repeated contacts, so he didn't get the item, and I relisted the item - and it sold, and this time, I got the money, the buyer got the item - and everyone was happy.
My most recent experience has involved a VGA->TV converter that didn't work after I bought it. I have since contacted the seller, and he has said he will refund my money - we are still working things out, but I expect this transaction to go good as well.
There are obvious scams out there - some you have to watch for, and others are fun (I actually tried, knowing what I might find, to buy the Projection TV converter - I got a lens, and instructions - and they suck! - but I had a laugh - I got what I expected, and the seller got his money - so I did get sold something, and it wasn't a true "scam").
I think Ebay goes too far with this, though - I don't have a problem with a seller using Ebay as advertising, as long as they really sell a product (I do hate those sellers who put up Ebay ads with a price of 1 cent or something - all to get you to come to their site, only). I have gone to some seller's sites, and actually found it cheaper to buy from their own site, than from the auction (just because it is fixed price).
Online auctions are wacky things - sorta like real life f2f auctions, but in other ways strange...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
That's just plain dumb.
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Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org