Thinking of traditional country auctions where Widow Dillmore's furniture and farm machinery are auctioned off to the chant of The Auctioneer...

How do they handle sales that fail because the winning bidder walks away without paying up? Do prospective bidders have to put up cash on the barrel in escrow before they can bid? Or does "negative feedback" for the defaulter involve taking him out behind the barn and beating the snot out of him? What would Sotheby's do?

My, this happy-go-lucky fraudster is an interesting character, eh? Hope he gets busted and shut down. Sure must be an idiot what's more to have divulged his shilling practices to another, dis-interested person on the planet, so presumably it's just a matter of time.

When he wins his own auctions, I'll bet he initiates "Cancel Transaction" between Seller & Buyer so he doesn't pay Paypal fees on money sent to himself.

Also interesting to note that the fraudster apparently considers it more efficient to simply re-list rather than send Second Chance Offers. This corroborates a larger point I wanted to make, namely that for (honest) high volume eBay sellers with low to mid-priced items, it's fairly inefficient to bother sending 2nd Chance Offers. As work101 and others have observed, offerees are spooked and odds of a sale on the 2nd chance are maybe 10%, and whether successful or not the process causes significant delay (during which the item is otherwise removed from the market-place) and potentially generates a lot more time-consuming emails. So in my opinion, a dishonest high-volume eBay seller, of small to middling value items, is unlikely to make a serial practice of shilling and 2nd Chancing all his items, the waste of time would be so burdensome, let alone the chance of getting nailed and banned. To put it another way, I would say the higher the volume of the seller, the less chance he's shilling, at least for low to mid-priced items. Conversely, for a low volume of high-priced items, the attraction of shilling would be much, much greater IMHO.

Then again, some folks are compulsively dishonest, and would get a little thrill each time they cheated thousands of individuals, even if they have to parse through countless emails.

No, you cannot set the price if you use the 2nd Chance Offer. However you could simultaneously Contact the member like miamijim suggested, then simply offer to drop the amount of the shipping charge by an agreed amount, or agree to do a partial refund after the Paypal payment to reflect any accommodation both parties want to make.

Yes, this is the above-board way to do it. In negotiating the refund for "unwinding" the auction to the last legitimate bid, the buyer ought to be willing to share the cost of the fees that the seller will have to pay on the full Buy It Now price. I don't know what those are -- I've never sold anything -- but since it wasn't the seller's fault that the price was inflated by the false bid, the seller shouldn't have to eat the whole fee which is calculated on a gross price he's not actually going to get.

Speaking of deadbeats...I won an auction for a NOS Cinelli 1R stem a couple of weeks ago. Paid for the stem, then got a refund, and an email from the seller saying that he had sold the stem locally.

I left him negative feedback. He came back apologetically, offering to find me another NOS stem and express ship it to me, at no cost to me. I guess the negative feedback really hurt him. As soon as I receive the stem I will retract the negative feedback.

I did offer to pay for the stem, and I wonder whether he legitimately forgot to end the auction when the stem was sold, or what...

So ultimately I don't know whether the seller was a deadbeat or just has ADD

Lee

you framed it as an ethical question, there are no ethics on the internet cause nobody actually meets in person so its pretty much whatever you can get away with. the rules are set by eBay, don't break them. 99.999% there is no fraud going on with the second chance offer, its just the result of some broke idiot who bid on something he couldn't afford.

to the OP; if you don't like his price just message him and offer a different price. BTW whats the deal with eBay Japan how come dudes always ask me to ship to Japan from accounts from other countries like the US or England? is there some sort of restriction on Japanese eBay accounts and international bidding?