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Originally Posted by carlsonjok
Because it is a nonsensical point.
You know who also doesn't have access to eBay's databases? Everyone else. Including laymen who can, based on publicly available information, easily point to circumstances that strongly indicate illegitimate (and likely illegal) bidding behavior. And guess what? While those laymen only have access to anonymized bidder IDs, PWCC has access to the full bidder ID. And, if PWCC is as important to eBay as you like to tell us ad nauseum that they are, then they are one phone call away from knowing the bidders name and address that can be checked against the consigner's.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
As I've pointed out many times when I see idiocy like PWCC can't possibly monitor its own business, it takes a few minutes at most to sort your auctions by highest bid price and look through a given number for unusual activity.
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Clearly, you guys don't understand the scale of what you are asking them to do or what it would take for them to "monitor their business" as you put it.
It's one thing to have an entire internet forum of free crowd-sourced resources with endless time on their hands and nothing better to do than clicking through random eBay listings in an effort to find someone who *might* be shill bidding their auctions. But it's something else entirely for a consignment company to be expected to hire a team to crawl through over 10,000 listings per week, mapping out eBay user IDs and cross-checking them to see which users might be shilling their consignments. This is an absolutely ridiculous expectation. Do you have any idea how much this would cost? Do you know how much it would cost just to set up and maintain a database alone to handle this, let alone the manpower? They've sold well in excess of a million eBay listings lol. Perhaps you don't realize that clicking on a 'bid history' link that shows eBay user IDs is not "access to the data". There's a
huge difference between clicking links and seeing names and having the access to the data required to monitor something like this at scale and to be able to write code that enables you to intervene when necessary. When I say "they don't have access to the data", clearly this point has not landed with you guys. You clearly are not data people. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about here. You couldn't possibly have ever spent a day in your life in the tech industry if you actually expect them to do this. Meanwhile, this is an
easy problem for eBay to solve. They already have the database set up with all the relevant data at their fingertips and the resources (data analysts & data scientists) to do it, not to mention
the responsibility to do this. And let's not forget, they also already claim to do this on their website (even though they clearly do a shit job of it).
I have personally written fraud detection algorithms and have coded out large-scale projects just like this for my previous employer (a large insurance company). I know what it would take to accomplish what you guys are proposing. This is a
huge undertaking. It's not just asking Billy and Sally to spot-check a few listings over their lunch break.