AW Daily - Tips & Tactics - During the Auction: Blocking Bidders

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by Nancy L. Hix

Why block anyone from bidding on your auctions? Simple: You do it for the same reason your local quick-mart owner tosses out shoplifters and loiterers. It's the online auction equivalent of telling a deadbeat bidder or problematic user "we don't want your business." Read on for an overview of bid blocking, including why you'd want to take advantage of such a feature, which sites offer it, and how the venues vary.

For the Block
There are several instances when a seller may want to prevent bids from a particular user:

Overall negative feedback rating or an abundance of recent negative feedbacks in the user's record
Bad experiences with that user in the past
Warnings from other users
Harassing or threatening email received from that user

At eBay, your reason for blocking a user from bidding on one of your auctions simply can be that you are not comfortable doing business with a particular person. You don't have to include specifics when you make your blocking request (more on that later).

The main benefits of bid blocking is that it helps users avoid dealing with habitual deadbeat or nuisance bidders, and that the auction site doesn't have to issue so many final value fee refund requests. The two biggest online auction sites, eBay and Yahoo Auctions, each have their own version of bid blocking.

Yahoo Auctions' Blacklist
Under certain circumstances, you might want to prevent a specific bidder from bidding on your auctions. From Yahoo Auctions' "Options" link, you can build what the site calls a "blacklist." You'll enter the IDs of any users you want to have blocked from your auctions. If these users attempt to bid on them, they'll see a message stating that they're not authorized to bid on that auction. Adding and deleting users from your blacklist is done via an onscreen interface. You can blacklist users when you enter an auction, when you cancel a user's bid, or at any time during an auction's duration.

To remove a bidder from your blacklist, select that user from the same form and click on the "Delete" button. You can edit your blacklist at any time by clicking on "Options."

One Online Auction Users Association (OAUA) member and Yahoo Auctions user has had good results with the site's blacklist feature. She sold a teapot, clearly specifying that it was for display only. Upon receipt of the item, the high bidder didn't like it, and sent the seller several harassing emails. She refunded the $9.99 but never got the teapot back. "I did some research on his history with the site and noticed that he had given others really nasty feedback," she said. "I blocked him so he couldn't bid on my auctions again."

eBay's Pre-Approved Bidder Feature
This feature is the reverse of a blacklist but has the same basic intent--to allow some bidders and to block the rest. You'll create your own pre-approved bidder list for any auction and allow only those on your list to bid on that item. If a bidder who isn't part of your list attempts to bid, he or she will receive a notification to contact you by email to place a bid. You can add or delete bidders until the time your listing ends. eBay does warn, however, that the feature can limit the number of bids on your item.

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