Ending Ebay listings early

[freakhappy]

I don't believe there is anything unethical about asking a seller to end their auction early. I can see where it may frustrate people, but in no way is it unethical. You are not taking advantage of anyone by emailing them, but rather just asking them if they would take your offer on a particular item. If an item has a bid on it, I don't ask to end it early, but that's just me. Usually I email a seller if they have a BIN that I don't quite like the price of and see if they will drop it somewhat. If they don't, I move on with life...it's as simple as that. People that have a problem with this type of activity simply do not have to participate...it hurts no one.

I think David was correct in his assessment and the example he gave.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by freakhappy

People that have a problem with this type of activity simply do not have to participate...it hurts no one.

The same could be said for taking steroids.
Or cheating on someone
Or doing drugs
Or robbing banks.

Wrong is wrong.

Steve B

[vintagetoppsguy]

Originally Posted by steve B

The same could be said for taking steroids.
Or cheating on someone
Or doing drugs
Or robbing banks.

Wrong is wrong.

Steve B

When the OP first asked this question, I gave my opinion and told him that he would get many different answers on this subject. Now here we are 44 posts later. Steve, I enjoy reading your posts and think you are a great guy, but come on, are you really comparing illegal activity with asking a seller to end an item early?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by vintagetoppsguy

When the OP first asked this question, I gave my opinion and told him that he would get many different answers on this subject. Now here we are 44 posts later. Steve, I enjoy reading your posts and think you are a great guy, but come on, are you really comparing illegal activity with asking a seller to end an item early?

It's just the attitude of justification that anything is ok because it's only "a little wrong" or "since other people do it I have to"

Yes, my examples were a bit extreme except the steroids one. Many of the substances taken were legal and not against baseballs rules at the time. Others could be legally prescribed, and were also within baseballs rules. Probably more within the rules than ending early to sell off Ebay.

And it does harm people, even if only slightly in each situation.
Lets say I plan on bidding $150. but someone sends an offer of $125 and the seller ends early. The seller is out $25, Ebay is out their percentage, and I'm out the opportunity to compete for the card and potentially buy it. (To be clear I'm not including fixed price listings with the make an offer feature, just auctions.)
The first two can be measured, but the third isn't readily assigned a value.
The last harm and hardest to pin down is that after seeing auctions pulled a few times I may be less inclined to watch or bid o anything. And that drives the overall activity down if it's a common enough thing.
There are about 340000 card auctions right now, if only 10% of them are affected by one bid increment of 50 cents that's roughly 17,000 a week or close to 900,000 a year in lost sales just in cards.

The argument culd be made that nobody can know the auction would have brought more. But not knowing something happened doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Steve B

[Deertick]

I you want an item, bid on it! Planning to bid at the last second does not constitute a bid. If you do not place a bid, you have no horse in the race. The seller is free to do whatever he wishes with the item (with certain exclusions previously mentioned). If that means accepting an emailed offer, so be it.

Now if you HAVE bid on it, the seller has no idea what your proxy bid is. He (and the buyer) is mitigating the risk as others have stated. The buyer has taken the initiative to find out the price point that is acceptable to the seller. This may be significantly less than what YOU were willing to pay. The only way around it is to contact the seller yourself with an offer.

BTW, this was much more prevalent and accepted back in the day
when "Reserve" auctions were more common. I would receive 5-10 emails per auction asking what the reserve was. Some sellers would list the reserve in the description, in effect telling you "what it would take".

As a caveat, any time I end an auction (to sell), or ask someone to end an auction, I insist that it goes through the ebay checkout process. There are too many scams to risk it. Besides, eBay used to send out "bait offers" and suspend you if you offered to sell offline. Not sure they still do it, but.....

[steve B]

It must be nice to have enough budget to bid on every item you're interested in.
That's not my situation. If it's yours I'm genuinely happy for you.

My watching is usually full, and I place snipe bids manually. On some items the decision to bid or not is made for me by other bidders, exceeding my max early. Sometimes not.
Typically I have a bunch of stuff I'm interested in and something more interesting comes along. So I'll bypass the less interesting ones to place a more solid bid. If I really want something I'll place an early weak bid and then bid my max right near the end. And rarely I'll have a relatively insane bid as a backup. (Bids at usually 8-10 seconds and 2-4 seconds. )

Nothing is as enjoyable as passing on some nice stuff to commit your entire months budget on something and find it ended early, but late enough that the other stuff has closed.

But then there's always some other interesting thing the next few days anyway so it's not so bad.

Steve B

[Deertick]

Originally Posted by steve B

It must be nice to have enough budget to bid on every item you're interested in.
That's not my situation. If it's yours I'm genuinely happy for you.

My watching is usually full, and I place snipe bids manually. On some items the decision to bid or not is made for me by other bidders, exceeding my max early. Sometimes not.
Typically I have a bunch of stuff I'm interested in and something more interesting comes along. So I'll bypass the less interesting ones to place a more solid bid. If I really want something I'll place an early weak bid and then bid my max right near the end. And rarely I'll have a relatively insane bid as a backup. (Bids at usually 8-10 seconds and 2-4 seconds. )

Nothing is as enjoyable as passing on some nice stuff to commit your entire months budget on something and find it ended early, but late enough that the other stuff has closed.

But then there's always some other interesting thing the next few days anyway so it's not so bad.

Steve B

And that is a fair point, Steve. But if you "really want" a particular item there is no harm in making your offer.
And I know about the frustration on both sides: 1)Losing what I thought was a great deal and 2) having to sell a $50 card for $.99 because I was SURE there'd be a bidding war! (Turns out it was my bad. I had only the title and pic correct, the description and category was from a pair of jeans i had listed previously. Bad Turbo Lister! BAD!)

[freakhappy]

Originally Posted by steve B

The same could be said for taking steroids.
Or cheating on someone
Or doing drugs
Or robbing banks.

Wrong is wrong.

Steve B

Key words there Steve is that it HURTS NO ONE. Your examples do HURT people

I guess it's wrong to throw a curve ball too, right? I mean, since it curves out of the way of the strike zone and doesn't give the batter a chance to hit it most of the time, it should be banned from baseball.