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How eBay Sellers Fix Auctions
Boj writes "The Times online is carrying stories on fraud carried out on eBay using shill bidding. Citing eBay's changes to security as aiding the shill bidders and this fraud:
"Last November eBay changed its rules to conceal bidders' identity — making it even more difficult for customers to see whether sellers are bidding on their own lots.""
Ebay knows about this type of fraud and other types and they do very little to combat.
Go to ebay and do a search on 'wholesale list'. You will find people attepting to deceive the buyers, I'll even say that much of this is fraud.
I would bet that among the 'power sellers' (and others) there were organized 'teams' of people that artifically jack up the prices for profit.
Now, if ebay KNEW about these practices and did nothing to stop them, could they be found liable?
I have been a victim of Ebay fraud, complained and heard nothing back. I sucks, but I now expect that from both ebay and paypal.
"Last November eBay changed its rules to conceal bidders' identity making it even more difficult for customers to see whether sellers are bidding on their own lots."
What this also does is it keeps people that wish to help fix the problem from doing so. IE, I see an obvious fraud attempt on EBAY and try to contact the people that are about to be screwed. I can't do it.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Only pay what you can afford and what you think something is worth. If a seller out bids you on their own product. Fine, let them keep it.
Personally, I avoid eBay like a plague. it's got sucker written all over it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Then what the seller does is send you a "second chance" email if you are the last bidder saying that the original bidder didn't pay or what not and lets you pay what they were offering for the item. The Second Chance is now an offical Ebay thing... which of course is being abused by the Shrills...
Because you can look at the user feedback and see if there is a lot of cross-feed-backing going on between the involved parties and also you can see if these are low-feedback users raising the bid.
;-)
I had this happening to me once. I'd put in a bid and then somebody would raise it and raise it again until just topping my bid, then withdraw the highest bid. Complained to EBay but they did nothing. In the end, I waited a while after the shill's last bid, then put in a bid of my own. The shill really quickly raised it again a few times then withdrew his last bid that topped mine. At which point, I withdrew my last bid and left the shill in the winning position with a few seconds to go and a bid that was too old to withdraw. So he ended up paying EBay for the privilege of selling the item to himself
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
You'd be surprised how poorly that tends to work. First off, when you set a higher starting price, you pay higher listing fees. Second, when the price is set low initially, it can help trigger a bidding frenzy. Especially when someone decides they're willing to pay $100 for your item, so they put that in as their max bid, but their initial bid only shows up as $1. So when someone else enters a bid, it quickly starts going up and up and up. Next thing you, people are bidding hundreds of dollars because they're now emotionally invested in getting *that* item.
The psychology of eBay is pretty fascinating. I used to buy and sell on there quite a bit, and have a friend who started his own sell-it-on-eBay company, using just the tactics I described above. Sometimes you'll end up selling for less than you wanted, but more often than not you make a killing.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
eBay's listing fees mean you pay more to list an item with a higher starting price. Simply put, it costs the seller more to have $100 auctions than $1 auctions. Same thing with reserve auctions, the seller pays for the privilege.
In a very real sense, eBay is encouraging shill bidders with their listing fees. They'd be gone overnight if listing fees were the same irrespective of the auction start value. After all, eBay is still getting their ending value fees.
Personally, I avoid eBay like a plague. it's got sucker written all over it.
Well, that may be. But they stay in business for a reason. If I have something to sell, I can reach a larger market than I can locally. And when I'm looking for some uber rare item that it would take years and thousands of dollars in gasoline to find by scouring every used record store, book store, person's home, etc., ebay comes in very handy.
I've only been burned a couple of times (out of several hundred transactions) and then only for low value items.
My own personal strategies for a succesful transaction include:
1) Never bid on camcorders, computers, automobiles, or any other high dollar item.
2) Always do an extensive check of the seller's feedback.
3) Don't bid early or get involved in bidding wars. Snipe instead.
Imagine your wife's grandma's heirloom china set is worth $400 on the market, but priceless to her. You have recently dropped one plate, and it's irreplaceable. The plate is worth $80 on the market. 6 months later, you see the plate on Ebay, drawing insipid bidding, reflecting relatively low demand, stuck at $40. Your web design business has been doing well, and you can afford $200 to get back in grace with your wife. You therefore bid $200, raising the current bid to $42. On the final day, you see a series of bids in , all by the same person, raising the price to $160. This is the point at which the shiller did not dare to raise the bid for fear of outbidding you.
Effectively, he got free information about how much you are willing to bid. Information is money. It's like when you're bargaining on a used care--you start with your offer. You don't tell the salesman how much money you brought, and then start bargaining.
In the example above, you pay less than the item is worth TO YOU, but more than market, because the shiller was able to tease that info out of you.
How is sniping being an asshole? I'm under no obligation to fork over as much money as a seller is willing to take. Nor am I under any obligation to get into a bidding war with some fanatic to whom winning the auction (at any price) is more important than obtaining the item.
Sure ebay isn't a brick'n'mortar auction house, and it has a different set of rules. So what? In the real world, people don't always pay the asking price --- they are free to haggle in an attempt to bring the price down. Is that also being an asshole? That's the way the market works --- the seller wants to maximize the selling price, and the buyer wants to minimize it. You understand the framework. My advice: If you are a buyer intent on winning, put in a high bid, or snipe it yourself. If you are a seller, set a reserve price. If you don't like the game, don't play.
but it's still an asshole move most often capitalized upon by people with less active lives that have time resources to snipe in whenever their auction of interest happens to be ending.
Here:
http://www.jbidwatcher.com/
Now you too can snipe w/out having to sacrifice your active lifestyle.
Just configure it with the auction number to snipe - the amount you want to snipe - and go on with life.
First they burn books, then they burn people.
Sure it's easy enough to justify the action of sniping, just like paying some kid for his spot in line to get a playstation, but it's still an asshole move most often capitalized upon by people with less active lives that have time resources to snipe in whenever their auction of interest happens to be ending. I'm not sure if it's just laziness on the part of programmers at eBay, but I imagine they could gleam a better profit margin by emulating certain aspects of the time tested traditional auction format where bidding is extended upon attempted sniping.
In an ideal world, sniping should have absolutely no effect on the outcome of an auction. It shouldn't matter whether you put your bid in one second after the auction opens or one second before the auction ends, the winner will always be the highest bidder, sniper or not. Unfortunately, eBay is infested with morons. These morons think that they need to bid the minimum each time, like they do in the auction houses they've seen in old sitcoms. When they see that they've been outbid, they bid another dollar, then another, and another... In the span of thirty seconds, they'll place a dozen bids or more, each just a dollar higher than the last, not stopping until they have the high bid (regardless of what the item is actually worth). Considering that you are supposed to bid the maximum you are willing to pay, this behavior makes no sense; if the price you are willing to pay fluctuates that quickly, you should be too stupid to use a computer (unfortunately, this never seems to be the case...).
This problem is easily avoided by not signaling your intent to bid on the item until it is too late for the morons to place more clueless bids. You aren't cheating anyone, you are just holding the morons to their initial bids. People only have a problem with sniping when they think "I would have been willing to pay that price." They'll keep thinking, "It's just another dollar..." even though the fact is, someone was willing to pay more; the high bid is all that matters. If you can't make up your damn mind, you shouldn't be bidding at all.
Snipers do nothing illegal, immoral, unfair, unkind, rude, or unexpected. They place bids, just like everyone else on eBay. Sometimes they win the item, sometimes they don't (and many times they will pass on bidding on an item entirely because the price in the last few seconds is higher than they are willing to pay). Sniping actually forces a handicap on the bidder; by sniping, the bidder has only one chance to place a bid, and even then only if there are no technical issues that prevent the bid from being placed in time.
As for the idea of extending auctions when late bids are placed, that's just idiotic. In most cases you have 5 or 7 days to place a bid. If you can't figure out what you are willing to pay in a week, what good will another 15 minutes do? All I can see is that you might get swept up in the heat of the moment and bid way too much, raising prices for other bidders and giving the sellers the pleasure of trying to collect money from people who are incapable of making decisions - and driving an increasing number of users to alternatives that don't play stupid games with the auction's end time.
I have a solution for all of you who whine about snipers. It is really simple, 100 percent effective, and completely free. Bid more than you are willing to pay. That's it. If you get outbid, it's no big deal, because you never wanted to pay that much in the first place. If you win at your high bid, you may have spent too much, but you get that joy of winning that you seem so concerned about. Best of all, it requires no changes to anything else, so it couldn't be easier to implement.