PWCC and Bid Retractions

[botn]

Originally Posted by dariushou

See, i have a problem with that. He's in business of making money and he should be protecting his investment. Not me. It is very easy for him to hire a data guy to data scrape his auctions for this. His policy -- 2nd and 3rd paragraphs are their vague policing strategy...

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=229658

Are they not working with EBAY on this? Has EBAY put in code that does not allow those with over 25 bid retractions to bid on PWCC auctions? How do you stop last second (sniped) shilling with people with bid retractions greater than 25? So is there any policing whatsoever? Not even a data scraper. Based on auctions values that are ending, I would think PWCC is making enough cash. I couldn't imagine coming out with a policy like this in my profession and not being burned at the stake if i did not adequately implement and police it. In fact, i would have the regulators in my biz as soon as any of this non-sense started. I hate regulations, but maybe that's what this industry needs -- someone with some teeth...venting of course but come on.

Oh yeah, that post by Brent was just to make everyone feel better. You didn't actually think that policy, as well as others, would actually be implemented, did you? No consequences for his not following through on any enforcement or at least efforts to enforce policies that protect the buyers. He had 15,000 listings this month and very strong prices throughout. If I were Brent I would not change a thing. Seems to be working very very well for him.

[Peter_Spaeth]

It appears there is no automatic block, from what Brent said.

eBay wide, any user ID that has a high number of bid retractions on the eBay platform will be blocked from participating in PWCC auctions. We believe that the majority of users who abuse the bid retraction tool will cease this behavior. We have to establish a starting point, so to start any user ID we identify that has greater than 25 bid retractions over the last six months will be blocked from participating in PWCC auctions. Any user ID we identify with between 10 and 25 retractions will be notified of our policy and warned. In time, we plan to reduce the allowed number of retractions to 10, and perhaps as low as 5. Note: a user’s bid retraction count is not a statistic we can automatically filter; we appreciate the help of the collecting community in identifying user IDs which show quantities beyond our defined limits.

[D.P.Johnson]

I'm pretty sure ebay allows people to have an unlimited number of accounts. Thus, if someone really, really, really, really, really, really, really wants to shill (ahem...I mean retract their bids), they'll figure out away around any supposed "restrictions"...