eBay Accused of Price Gouging Scheme

Symbiot writes "eBay is being sued in a Calilfornia court for a practice that the plaintiff, Glenn Block of Pennsylvania, claims artificially raises the amount of a bid. The practice combines the warning emails that eBay sends out when you are the highest bidder and your bid is at your maximum, with the bid increment mechanism. It seems that if your original maximum bid settnig prevents your current bid from falling on an increment then your current bid will be raised to the next increment as soon as you raise your maximum. If the plaintiff wins this class action suit could cost eBay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."

Comments

Had Similar Experiences

[ackthpt]

"Based on what we know about what's being alleged, it appears the plaintiff completely misunderstands the functionality of the eBay bidding system," eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said. He said the company had not yet seen the lawsuit.

Bullshit. This happened to me once.

I had a max of say 100.01 and another bidder had bid 100.00 while the current high was substantially lower, so it showed 'You have been outbid the current high bid is 100.01' Now, they could bid at least 102.51 and take the lead or had figured that was just too much, either way, I see that they have homed in and I raise my cap to 125.00, suddenly my high bid is 102.50 rather than 100.01.

To shed a different light on this, there was another time a similar thing happened, but when I reloaded the page later it would revert back to my prior high bid, which can be handy for disguising what your actual new cap is. I'm sure they know all about it and had fiddled with the way it works.

It happened once to my knowledge, so I'm probably only entitled to a couple bucks, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

If the plaintiff wins this class action suit could cost eBay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."

I think that's a gross exaggeration of the problem, however it could cost eBay a lot in man-hours auditting the results of every auction since the beginning to determine who is entitled to a refund.

That ain't all

[Stumbles]

Yeah I've noticed that. Another thing I have noticed when "shopping" around there. There will be an item with say a 7 day auction and it's on day 4 and there were 6 bidders. I see a number of instances where some are all of them bidders have been signed up as a buyer for 2+ years and bought nothing in all that time. But all of a sudden they decide they want the item I want. Hmmmmm.