Yet more EBay shenanigans
 

I'm the leading bidder on an item that has received multiple bids and there is less than 12 hours left when suddenly it is listed as sold for a much lower price. What happened? Is it allowed? Should I report it?

I bid on two items ending concurrently from the same seller (not the guy above) and lose both auctions. Immediately I receive "2nd chance" offers to buy them at my maximum bid. Obviously shrill bidding is going on. One item I bought (because I needed it), the other I did not........but should I report the seller? Will it do any good or is it a waste of time?

:cry::cry::cry:

Sorry mate, my condolences. Afraid I can't be of much help though.

Was there a "buy it now" price on the first item??

The first was listed as "sold" and not "ended"? That sounds weird and I can't think how that was pulled off. Maybe the seller made a combination deal with another buyer on another item and included your item in the deal by adding a lower BIN price.

I'm not sure reporting the second seller will do much, especially since you bought one of the items. It's been a long time since that happened to me, but I counteroffer at the bid I had before the shill pumped it up.

Sure, report it. I don't know what good will come of it, but eBay is interested in this kind of thing.

Have not heard of the first scenario before although I suspect things sometimes get sold locally and "de-listed" from eBay. Guys here sometimes list stuff on the forum and eBay concurrently. Not sure if that's what you encountered though.

While you suspect shilling to have occurred on the other items, can you be certain? If so, then by all means report it to eBay. But also know that there is a possibility that the winners backed out of their bids leaving the seller high and dry. You'll hear all kinds of stories from other forum members about how flaky eBay buyers can be.

In the end, you're in the drivers seat. You were ready to pay your price until you suspected shilling and now you feel cheated and no longer want to pay that price. So don't. Or pay it and be happy you got it for the price you were willing to pay in the first place.

Fun stuff :)

I usually list items here and ebay, ebay at a higher price of course. But if I do list it as an auction, as soon as I get my first bid I remove it from this site. I feel like Im obligated to the auction after that.

I have a friend that sells on eBay, higher end bikes, and he often sells the item before the end of the auction.
eBay doesn't seem to mind, as long as they get their cut of whatever the price was, as does PayPal.
My friend says, with higher end bikes, the winner only wants the item half the time, so he's more sure of the lower sale.

Your second scenario is either a shill bidder or one of those bidders who bids on tons of stuff and then reneges on whatever he doesn't want.
There seems to be no penalty for this, and it's up to the seller to report the bidder, which they rarely do.

Sounds like an earlier bidder made an offer and it was taken, probably locally, which is odd, but with bikes, not having to pack and ship is a big convenience.

I had a similar issue a year ago. I won a bidding war on a vintage french rando frame, and the buyer emailed me and said he decided not to sell it. I was pissed, even posted on this forum, and most people recommended I just let it go. So it's time for me to pass that advice to you.

Oddly enough, about 6 months later the same exact frame was posted for sale over at the 650b Google group. It was for signficantly less than my original bid. I snapped it up, contemplated sticking my tongue out and taking a selfie after the frame arrived, but my better side got the best of me, for once.

Karma, baby!

i won an auction recently on a campy nr rd for $35, but it wasn't shipped.

- the seller first told me the rd was mistakenly picked up by a coworker and it would be a few days before shipment.
- a few days later the seller said the rd was mistakenly given away to a co-op, but he wanted to "make it right."
- i wrote that i'd like a refund and $5 extra.
- i had a hard time sending him my email address through ebay messaging for the $5 paypal payment.
- after he refunded me the purchase price, i finally said, "forget it" for the additional $5.
- he then paypal'd me $15.
- pleasantly surprised, i gave him positive feedback.

i then found another nr rd for about the same price. B^)

eBay Shill Bidding
 

Before eBay switched to hiding buyer's ID's it was somewhat easier to spot shill bidders through a little research.

For example, a quick check on a buyer who was bidding up an item might have revealed that they had an eBay account for a long time with little or no feedback or else all they bought were women's or kid's clothes, household goods etc. with no history of buying anything related to cycling!

You can still find a little history about a bidder by going into BID HISTORY: DETAILS, 30-Day Bid History. It will tell you how many and what category of items the individual bid on, the number of different sellers and if they won the "auction" (the number of bids is in bold type).

The steps listed above were not a smoking gun, but combined with the sellers feedback notes gave/gives a little more information to go on.

Even if I suspected shill bidding I'd stay in the running until the price went over my preset limit of what I was willing to pay.

Another suspicious thing was/is getting sniped then getting a 2nd Chance Offer shortly after an auction closed.

A few years ago I was bidding on a bike that I really wanted. I'd been communicating back and forth with the seller starting with a reasonable offer to end the auction early (higher than the ending price).

I got sniped. I asked the seller to contact me with a 2nd Chance Offer if the "buyer" flaked" out

Two weeks later the bike was re-listed. I contacted the seller to ask why I didn't get a 2nd Chance Offer - they said that they did send me one! B.S.

The original auction ended north of $600. I was the only bidder in the second offer and got the bike for $300!

As [MENTION=381793]gugie[/MENTION] said in #10 Karma, baby! :P

It took the seller a month to ship the bike with lots of lame excuses and so on. When they did ship it, the frame was partially bubble wrapped, the wheels were loose in the box and someone dumped a bucket of Styrofoam peanuts in the rear corner. The frame arrived scratched up from the wheels rolling around in the box.

The whole auction was suspicious!


I just did a search on Gitane, Peugeot and Motobecane. Almost all of the listings were BIN or BO.... It looks like a lot of sellers, at least of French cycling related items are moving away from auctions.


verktyg :50:

Chas.

I have been both an ebay buyer and ebay seller forever. In probably 2000+ transactions, about 6 transactions have had issues, of which 3 were bicycle related.

All of my suggestions as to what could have happened have been described above, but I will echo, "Let it go". If it gives you peace of mind to report the seller, do so. I wouldn't hold my breathe over eBay doing anything about it, though (and not because they don't care, there just may not be enough evidence to prove anything). I think, as a fellow eBayer, we've all been there!

Selling since '02 with over 2000 feedback and like life. They're only bikes and no use ruining your day over something as simple as that. I've pulled auctions at the end as we've all had second thoughts on something or realized that I didn't inspect something fully and noticed issues with it. If I lose an auction then I figure it wasn't meant to be and smile.

Buy It Now rules are weird. For some auctions they go away with the first bid, for others when the bid reaches 50% of BIN price, or when the reserve is bid.

I used to be a regular buyer and seller on eBay, but rarely use it anymore. It is not worth the hassle and expenses much of the time. The expenses have gone up so much that it is hard to find bargains. ... Or, maybe I've just gotten tired of searching for the next holy grail and "upgrading" my cycling fleet.

Ahhh, ebay---can't live with it, can't chop it up and put it in the meat grinder. Though you may likely have a legitimate complaint, the first rule of ebay is to not lose sleep over crappy sellers, especially if you haven't lost any money. Not worth the stress.

This sounds a little weird. Ebay allows sellers to end a listing completely, automatically cancelling all bids. Ebay also allows sellers to end a listing early and sell the item to the current high bidder. The only way I can see to end a listing early and sell the item to a 2nd-/3rd-/etc-place bidder would be to first cancel the higher bids. So either the seller had to cancel your bid before ending the listing, or had to end the listing unsold, then relist as a Buy It Now at the lower price. Both of these scenarios are allowed, so there would be nothing to report. You could make a mental note that you don't like how that seller operates and not bid on his/her items.

Nothing here strikes me as fishy, though it's understandable you're disappointed. Ebay rules state: "a winning bid is a binding agreement to buy the item at the winning bid price", but they actually allow buyers to back out of any transaction. A buyer can select "I changed my mind" as the reason for not completing a transaction. There's also no real penalty for a winning bidder who doesn't pay. With RobbieTunes' friend finding only half of his winning bidders actually pay for the item, it's easy to see why a seller might want to grab a lower-priced but solid bid. Or why so many more listings these days are Buy It Now and/or Best Offer i/o auctions. Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't be disappointed, but I do understand why the seller may have done this.

Yeah, an "immediate" 2nd Chance Offer sure sounds like shill bidding. Flaky bidders who don't intend to pay don't notify the seller immediately to say "nyaa-nyaa, I ain't payin'", so it sounds like the seller was complicit. It wouldn't hurt to report the seller, though there's no way to tell what ebay might do. If the seller does have a pattern of shill-like behavior, ebay might spot that and do "something." They could start with a warning, they could suspend the account, but they could also do nothing. If nobody ever reports this bozo, though, there's nothing to stop him.

It's not difficult for a seller to end a listing, it's easy for a buyer to retract a bid and it's easy for a seller to cancel a bid, as long as you're not in the last 12hrs of the listing. Buyers can select "Bid the wrong amount" as the reason for retracting a bid, so bailing on any auction is easy. Sellers can select "Bidder is from a country I don't ship to" or "Unable to determine identity of bidder" as the reason for cancelling a bid. There is no "Bidder has insufficient feedback" reason, so if that's the reason, the seller just has to pick something else.

It's fairly easy to setup listings to automatically reject bids from countries you don't want to ship to, and many int'l bidders have US-based drop boxes as valid shipping addresses.

2nd Chance Offers are a weird, mixed bag. As a seller I seldom send them, since they almost never work. When I do send them, if the 2nd-place bidder doesn't buy within 12hrs or so I usually just relist. As a buyer I rarely accept them, especially if there's a significant gap between me and the 3rd-place bidder. Rationally I know I'm getting the item for what I agreed to pay, but it doesn't feel fair that the seller is getting my highest bid just because the bozo winning bidder backed out. And if the seller is shill bidding, I'm rewarding the practice. Like CliffordK, I've offered to buy 2nd Chance items at the 3rd-place price plus the bid increment, but that's never worked.

Thanks for the input.

I contacted the seller. He indicated he cancelled the auction (during the last 12 hours) when he found out he had mis-listed his item (he was selling SL pedals as super record titaniums) then sold the pedals to the guy who pointed this out for some undisclosed price. Why he listed the item as "sold" rather than "closed b/o listing error" I am unsure. When I look more closely at the original picture I suspect he is telling the truth.

As for the shrill bidder I suspect I won't do much. I did buy one of the two items for my maximum bid and it is a very nice clean SR bottom bracket although I would have felt better if I had gotten it for less. Hopefully the seller had to pay an Ebay commission on the other item (although I doubt it). The seller did use two different bidding names for each item......but again I'm sure it was a shrill job given the immediate and simultaneous 2nd chance offers I received.

Live and learn. No major money lost.

Not a huge loss, but a couple of months ago I won a SRAM derailleur for a Frankenbike project for .99 cents.
Naturally, I get a refund from the seller and a note saying "Oh, that already sold awhile back".

Oh, really? How much further back could it have been in this seven day auction? LOL.
The good deals are always too good to be true!

Benefit of doubt- maybe he had it on auto relist...