posted on November 26, 2000 04:48:19 PM
Recently, I have been experiencing a large number of bid retractions, sometimes at the last minute and they cause me to lose a lot of money. For example, I had a unit that did not power up, but is still worth money for either its arts or to fix up. I had three seperat bid retraction's: "cost too much to fix," "unit does not power," "bid on rwrong auction due to lag." These are BULL!! Yet eBay allows this...What can we do? Can we prevent this? In the past eek I had 30 auctions and 10 bid retractions!!
posted on November 26, 2000 05:20:35 PM
Hello Alan,
Not much you can do since eBay only allows feedback between seller and winning bidder.
Perhaps you might want to point out more explicitly the defects, damage or condition of items that are not fully operational. Many people bid somewhat impulsively and then read the fine print and then regret making the bid and retract it.
If you find someone who retracts on your auction and who has a history of retractions (look at their summary feedback for retractions over the past 6 months) you can email eBay about it and ask eBay to warn or suspend the bidder for retraction abuse.
Unless the retraction smacks of auction interference or the bidder has a history of retractions I would suggest letting a retraction go on the basis that a retraction is better than ending up with a deadbeat bidder.
posted on November 27, 2000 01:25:57 AM
I seldom let a retraction go. If I get a bidder's reason that is not allowable according to eBay's TOS, I report each and every one of them to eBay with a complaint. I have gotten users suspended for doing it.
If the retractions tend to happen near the end of the auction, you are likely to be the victim of Shield Bidding. THat is where a person with serveral accounts first places a low bid on the auction, then with another - usually fraudulant account name, pleaces a much higher bid to discourage any other Buyers from placing bids. Then, as the auction nears its close, the high bid is withdrawn and the Seller is left to selling at the List Price.
All scammers look for patsies. If, and I do mean IF this is happening to you, the unscupulous buyer will come back again and again with multiple names and fraudulant accounts. People who have been taken before by scammers are often put onto a list and that list is sent around to all the other scammers.
So, you may want to take a closer look at what is happening.
edited by me to be more readable
[ edited by Borillar on Nov 27, 2000 01:26 AM ]
posted on November 27, 2000 09:59:52 AM
I was thinking about what you said in regards to shield bidding.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have 2 fake ID's and then have your real one and conduct the shielding like this. Say the auction starts at 5$
1. Fake bidder 1: Put's in a fake bid (say $200 on an item worth only $50).
2. Fake bidder 2: Put's in another fake bid to beat Fake bidder's 1 bid (say $250) so the item's price is now just over $200. Nobody in their right mind is going to bid on it as they probably would after the first fake bid as they did not know the proxy bid was up to $200.
3. In the last few hours of the auction both fake bidders retract their bids putting the item back at $5.
4. The real bidder comes in and wisks the item up at a super cheap price and probably does not have to worry about sniping as nobody has this item on their watch list.
I had something like this happen to me one. Luckily I never have more than a couple items for sale at once and always check my bidding history to see what happened after the auction. I reported it to Safeharbour and this individual was given the boot.
