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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.
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
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.
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?
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
-
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.