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Old 05-27-2012, 09:17 AM
D. Bergin's Avatar
D. Bergin D. Bergin is offline
Dave
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: CT
Posts: 6,182
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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.
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