I have made my complaint known to e-bay and have not heard back (1 week now).
I placed a bid on an object that was worth in excess of $200.00. There were several bids and no reserve.
I bid $103.00 to start with and held high bid at $26. or so.
I received the high bid e-mail and when I checked back the sale was closed and all bids were rejected.
Reason, the seller no longer had the item available for sale.
However the very same item was for sale by the very same seller the next day. The seller did have it priced as, Buy it now for $200.00.
What really gets me is this seller has a 100% record.:smack:
Wiseassery aside, there’s no question to be asked. eBay seemingly always sides with the jackass in any dispute. And other than complaining to eBay, there’s nothing the OP can do about it right now. He’s not out any money, so no Paypal dispute.
If the OP is asking, “What do I do?”, the answer is “suck it up.”
In a real-life auction, the seller can withdraw the item from sale before the auction has ended. That’s what’s happened here, and I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it.
My SO, who used to work for eBay*, tells me you won’t hear back from them, because eBay cannot divulge any sanctions due to privacy concerns. But reporting the violation was the right thing to do.
If this is the first incident with the seller, they’ll get a warning and that’s it. If the seller has a history of these sort of shenanigans they’ll get nastier, with sanctions which may include closing his seller account and not allowing him to open another.
*Note that he no longer does, this is not Official Response or anything like that. Just information that may or may not be true in this particular case.
What you can do is report the seller for reserve fee avoidance.
If they did it just the one time, they will get a warning. If they make a habit of it (listing an item without a reserve price and then yanking the item before the auction closes because the bidding wasn’t high enough), Ebay will take action.
I didn’t re-read my post and was interested in what one could do about a lying seller, and was ranting for the most part anyway.
It just frustrated me with the seller having a 100% rating.
Thanks for the responses.
Whenever you have an eBay question, just ask yourself “in what way will eBay make the most money?” That answer will give you your answer.
eBay will benefit from the sale if it is at $200 instead of whatever your lowest bid was. They have no motivation to help you.
Just wanted to add a story. When I was new to eBay, I bid on an item and right before the end of the auction, someone bid right up to where my maximum bid would be used to win the auction. At first, I wasn’t annoyed, but I did some looking around on the auctions that this person was running, and the particular bidder who upped my ultimate buying price bid on almost every one of this guy’s auctions. He seldom won an auction, but when he did, the feedback was always the same. Clearly a second account used to shill bid. The best part was the guy was so stupid, he listed the same city for each account, so it was pretty easy to track. I compiled all of the information and sent it to eBay. I heard NOTHING back. About 8 months later, eBay changed its policy to permit people to see the names of each bidder. They instead put a letter followed by stars followed by a number, so bidders can’t identify each other.
eBay encourages shill bidding. Anything to increase their percentage on each auction.
