I’m having a slightly comical series of exchanges with an eBay seller who made me a ‘second chance’ offer. I suspect him of using a shill to drive up the price during the actual auction and I’m looking for evidence. He’s blatantly evading my questions.
So much for context, now the question. sBay has a ‘no shill’ policy and for very good reason since using a shill makes it dead easy to ascertain each bidder’s ‘walk away’ price, something a seller in a fair auction has no right to know. Given this policy, and the excellent reasons for it, why are eBay’s second chance offers made at the level of the would-be buyer’s highest bid instead of the bid that would have won had the official winner not disrupted the auction. Surely a bidder who can’t or won’t complete a transaction should be entirely discounted in ascertaining genuine market value. This reasoning applies just as clearly to cases where a second chance offer is made because the seller has more than one item for sale as when the official winner defaults. In both cases, the market really says that the offer should be made at the lower price. Or am I missing something here?
nope … sounds right on the money. I would not ever be inclined to entertain a second chance offer from a seller. If he didn’t get a legitimate winning bid, he has the ability to re-list the item. Sounds shady at the very least.
This really makes me wonder about the sincerity of eBay’s official anti-shill policy. They claim to be able to detect shills but I’m not sure how a smart operator could be caught. Obviously you couldn’t do it very often; there must be software that would alert them to certain kinds of suspicious patterns.
It would be pretty easy to have a fairer second chance system based on what would have been the winning bid if not for the defaulter. Since it would be optional, no seller need play who didn’t want to.
In rare cases it is rational to accept a second chance offer I think. If your losing bid was very close and you withdrew thinking falsely that the serious bidding was just about to start, you might think the offer a bargain. Markets change all the time and guessing market value tomorrow is just that—educated guessing. I’m surprised at how often the same item sells for much less than losing bids the first time around when two auctions end only minutes apart.
You’re lucky you didn’t get one of the real bold shill bidders, who retracts their last bid and leaves you the high bidder at your max bid. Then you either have to pay up or get a non-paying bidder strike. The eBay discussion forums are full of these and other soap-opera-y scenarios. I read them for light entertainment but it’s a good place to go with questions such as yours.
Gracious, life is complicated. I have not used eBay in several years, and it sounds as if the available twists, scams, and gimmicks have multiplied geometrically.
I don’t transact at eBay at all but do occasionally clink on the links that you folks post or go exploring for other items. I’m asking about when someone retracts their last bid, leaving you the high bidder and you have to get a non-paying bidder strike.
I don’t know what “non-paying bidder strike” means. I’m guessing that means you retract your bid too. Doesn’t that make you just as obnoxious as the shill? If you weren’t planning on paying that maximum a bid, why enter that bid in the first place?
If a high bidder doesn’t pay, the seller has the option of filing a NPB case against the buyer. The buyer has a certain time frame to respond and work things out, or else the seller can close the case, and the buyer has a “strike” on their record, and can be suspended for further abuses. Or something like that.
I only brought this up in a scenario where the remaining high bidder believes s/he was the victim of a shill bid and doesn’t want to reward the seller with their maximum bid price. The better course of action would be to report the activity to eBay and have them look into the alleged shill bidder’s ID, history of bidding, etc. They’re unlikely to catch much of that type of activity automatically but if it’s brought to their attention they might find a pattern.