Ebay retractions

[D. Bergin]

Whether it's shilling or not, it's an awful trend that Ebay doesn't seem to give a crap about.

There are hundreds of bidders out there now who are using bid retractions just because they can or as a bidding strategy. Either out of curiosity to see how high an auction is bid up to, before they retract their bid, to interfere with an auction for their own benefit, or to interfere with an auction, just for laughs.

I even got an angry e-mail from one of these guys after he retracted a bid in one of my auctions with just a couple of days left. I went and checked his history, saw he had a ton of retractions, and then I blocked him from my auctions.

"Why did you block me from your auctions, I have perfect feedback?" I hear back from him.

I explain to him, he's making me look like a shiller by retracting bids, and then trying to bid again, and that he has a regular history of doing this, so I can't really trust him. He gets back to me........."Oh, I had no idea, I promise I won't do it again."

Limit bid retractions, problem solved on many levels, Ebay..........nah, they have no scruples.

[CaramelMan]

there is no other way to explain the changes they have made over the last year or so...everything to make it easier to schill bid.

the more schill, the more the ending price, the more money for ebay, the more money for stockholders.

good for stockholders means they will continue to look the other way..in fact, they seem to ENCOURAGE IT!

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by CaramelMan

there is no other way to explain the changes they have made over the last year or so...everything to make it easier to schill bid.

the more schill, the more the ending price, the more money for ebay, the more money for stockholders.

good for stockholders means they will continue to look the other way..in fact, they seem to ENCOURAGE IT!

Problem is, that's short term thinking on Ebay's part. Letting it run rampant destroys bidder confidence, as witnessed on these boards, prices actually come down and Ebay makes less money.

All they have to do is limit retractions to something reasonable like 3 or 4 times a year, and the problem is solved...................but then they will have to field tons of calls from serial offenders "Oh, I really, really, really didn't want to bid on this item, can you please get rid of it, I know I'm over my limit"..............and Ebay doesn't want to hire the two extra phone reps they would need to deal with that.

Low overhead, high margins. That's all they really care about at this point.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Maybe sellers such as PWCC will ban people with astonishingly high retraction totals from their auctions, to avoid any perception of improprities. Then again,.....

[steve B]

The percentage bid activity with that seller just doesn't look like shilling.

The original three were 4, 6 and 39 percent. Shill accounts are usually well over 90 percent.

Retractions as a way to interfere or to find a reserve or someone elses high bid seems more likely to me. It's not something I'd be bothered with, but it would be easy to make an "obvious mistake" sort of bid, then retract claiming a typo. Of course the failure of that tactic is that you'd never know what snipe bids were in place. I'm not sure knowing the current maximum of an early bidder would be all that useful.

For reserves I usually just ask if I'm really interested but not sure just how much something will be. Some sellers will tell, some won't. I usually did, once it's reached, it's not a secret anyway.
And there aren't any cards I can afford where knowing someone elses bid would change mine. I have a pretty good idea of which ones will be more than I can spend.

Steve B

[Peter_Spaeth]

I don't think they are shill accounts either, but I could certainly see a consignor bidding to find out how high someone else is, then retracting once he knows.

[SMPEP]

I can think of legitimate reasons to retract a bid (a seller posts a picture with 7 cards, but is only selling 1 in the lot, and the bidder thought it had all 7 when they bid for example).

But I cannot come up with a single plausible explanation why a bidder would have two retractions on the same item. This is something Ebay should not allow.

I'll hold my breathe while I wait for this change.

Cheers,
Patrick

[DaveW]

Retractions on bids for Mickey Mantle cards? Could it be .... Adrian ....?

[kmac32]

Originally Posted by D. Bergin

Problem is, that's short term thinking on Ebay's part. Letting it run rampant destroys bidder confidence, as witnessed on these boards, prices actually come down and Ebay makes less money.

All they have to do is limit retractions to something reasonable like 3 or 4 times a year, and the problem is solved...................but then they will have to field tons of calls from serial offenders "Oh, I really, really, really didn't want to bid on this item, can you please get rid of it, I know I'm over my limit"..............and Ebay doesn't want to hire the two extra phone reps they would need to deal with that.

Low overhead, high margins. That's all they really care about at this point.

Well said. The telephone reps who they do have are lazy anyway. My experience is that they do not or are not willing to do their job correctly. I have yet to call in and have any of their reps do anything to fix legitimate problems so why would they start now.

[Peter_Spaeth]

I was so disgusted by a 100 percent obvious shilling situation with Carterscards that I phoned ebay. The rep agreed with me that it was 100 percent obvious but did nothing at all about it.