Does 100% bid activity w/one seller mean shilling?
 

I've seen a number of threads talk about shilling and reasons to believe so. I know one possible "give-away" on eBay is unusually high bid activity with one seller. My question is, could there be another explanation for that..? Or does that alone raise more than just a suspicion flag..?

I was looking at some common T206's last week and noticed one seller had some pretty aggressive bids well before auction-end. Clicking on a few of his cards to see the bid activity, I noticed many had the same bidder bidding up aggressively and/or trumping other bids. This one had a fairly low feedback number - I clicked on his bid activity w/that seller and it was 100%! I looked closer to see if I could line-up that bidder feedback number with recent feedback left for, or by this seller. I did find it, seemed that the feedback was especially glowing for this person (perhaps no doubt if he's over-paying :-)

With suspicions up, I let it go and didn't bid or up my snipes on anything else. Now, this morning, I noticed same - same seller, several cards up for sale, high bids in already and by that same bidder - still at 100% w/this seller.

I don't want to make unfounded accusations of anyone, but can't figure this one out. Would hate to point a finger and find out I'm wrong or there's an easy explanation? Could there be another explanation..? Is it logical that one buyer is so enamored with this seller that he only bids/buys from him and at top-end market prices?

Hard to think of another explanation. There might be one and others can chime in.

if one buyer bids so much from one seller, you would think he could contact that person outside of ebay and arrange more of a bulk buy with the seller and negotiate a discount deal for buying so many things. that is what has happened to me. someone buys something, notices i have a few things they want, then emails me and gives me their list and we work out a big deal, not just continously buying onesy-twosy off of ebay from me for a year or so. that doesnt make sense.

i noticed a seller of autographs once who had another ebay member continously bidding on every single auction the guy ever put up, with most of the bids ending at about the 75% mark of the final bid. it was enough to pump up the price and keep the action going, but never enough to actually win the item. he won the item only a couple of times, and 'surprise', the item never changed hands and just went back up for a relist by the same seller.

He said the guy never paid and so he relisted it, but he still lets the guy bid on every auction and doesnt ban the guy? the guy was bidding on every autograph he was selling, no matter if it was sports, presidential, entertainment, every 5 dollar autograph, every 500 dollar autograph.

what a scam. i confronted the seller who denied it of course said he didnt know the bidder even though the feedback said otherwise. yeah, right!

it's a shame it happens and hopefully ebay keeps an eye out for patterns like that, but they might not do anything about it unless they are alerted to it.

In short. No.

That alone does not mean the seller is shilling.

Those records only take into account 30 day activity. I don't bid on Ebay anymore as much as I used to, but I'm sure there were some months I only bid with one of two sellers.

Many dealers specialize in certain areas, and many of them have customers who are comfortable dealing with them, especially if they were already comfortable with this dealer, outside of the Ebay world. This idea that all buyers have a wealth of funds to spend every month..........and need to spread around the wealth evenly among all the Ebay sellers is pretty perplexing to me.

What you need to look out for is a consistent pattern of running up bids, a record of retractions, occasionally winning and having that seller offering those already sold items again..........on a regular basis.

The idea we can predict other bidders strategy based on our own bidding strategy is completely flawed. I've seen too many strange bidders over the years.

I'm dealing with one right now. Guy messaged me because my settings had him blocked. Says it was an honest mistake, Paypal has it in for him, etc...., I made an exception, let him through and he bid on three cards. Then he retracted a bid right away, bid on another card, retracted that bid and then re-bid on the card he retracted.

I signed out to check his bidding record and saw he had a history of retractions. I e-mailed him and told him tersely to please stop retracting or he's going back on the blocked list, even though he was the only one actually bidding on those items at the time.

I told him he was making ME look fishy.

With my communication back and forth with him, it sounds like he bids on stuff............then goes to check his collection and either keeps the bid or retracts it based on whether or not he already has it.

I scratched my head on that one and just hoped it didn't come back to bite me in the ass.

Your first scenario doesn't really work for me. I probably have dozens of customers who buy onesy-twosy off me at a time through auctions, over a period of years.

I have other customers who buy stuff off my websites, and sometimes I do bulk discounts with them.

The two rarely mix for some reason.

Your second definitely sounds like a shiller. Somebody doesn't pay me, they lose their bidding rights, right there, unless they have a damn good reason.

just bidding a lot with one seller might not mean and probably does not indicate shill bidding. you are right, you need more than that.

this guy i caught had 3 or 4 indicators of shill bidding, and when i informed him, he acted very strange, he was not very defensive about it when i suggested shill bidding like you would expect if he was totally innocent and he is a boxing collector/seller whose name most would recognize too. i told him to stop or i would report the activity to ebay. i eventually did report it but nothing got done. ebay is hesistant to do anything.

I bid on an auction of his and the shill kept bidding me up until i couldnt bid any more. i let the seller know something was fishy here. he cancelled the sale before it ended and said that if i believed there was shill bidding he would cancel the auction and start the auction over. hardly the actions of someone who was innocent.

Shilling
 

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't noticed if the cards won by the bidder with 100% on this seller resurfaced again from the original seller, but then again I haven't followed it up that closely either. Most of what I saw were bids up to a point early on, seemingly to keep the action going, then someone else would top it down the wire. This, in part, also fueled the shilling question in my mind?

Thanks again for your feedback!