Last night, I got one of those “Question from Ebay Member” messages. One of my auctions had ended with Buy It Now, and this member was offering to buy another copy of the item at the same price, if available. I was kind of tired at the time, and didn’t do anything.
Tonight, I get a message from the same person saying she was sorry if there was a misunderstanding, that she had received a warning from Ebay about side deals, and that she really meant to ask if I would be starting up an auction for another copy of the same item.
Okay, I’m kind of confused. I know with 100% certainty that I did not report this person to Ebay, though the second message suggests they are under that impression. The only plausible explanation is that Ebay read her message, although that seems rather odd, too–if they intercepted the message and determined that it broke Ebay rules, why would I still receive the message? Also, Ebay says that they do not read these “Question from Ebay Member” messages–are they telling the truth?
I have received side deal offers before, and nothing like this has happened, as far as I know.
The person may have tried a side deal with a different seller, who turned her in. She doesn’t know who reported it, so she sends out more email apologizing to anyone she e-mailed for side deals. That’s just a WAG of an explanation I can think of though.
It sounds to me like your non-response made her nervous. After her conscience gnawed at her for the better part of a day, she decided to pre-empt anything you might be considering by shooting you an e-mail.
Where I’m from, it’s called, “Covering Your Basis Post Haste”. Where everone else is from, it’s called, “Covering your Ass”.
I’ve offered side deals like that to sellers who are obvious dealers. No messages from ebay. It was like your situation where I was asking to buy an additional item. I could understand they complaining about an unsold item. If you relisted it, they stand a chance on getting a percentage. If I keep you from relisting it, they lose.
Lots of the dealers have regular web pages. Ebay is just a nice place to advertize their specials.
Ebay tries very hard to ensure they get their cut of the action. Notice that email addresses are no longer allowed for user names. People are “grandfathered” in who still want to use them, but no new accounts are allowed with email addresses as the user name.
It’s still possible to determine their email address by various means, but I’ll not mention them here.
Basically, they want all communication to be controlled and through their service.
If you use ASK SELLER A QUESTION form, Im sure a copy of it must be sent to Ebay & they may use a special text search on it to see if people are using backdoor deals. I read earlier this year they wwere gonna do something about those.
As a side note, sometimes I see people selling something for $1 & shipping $400.00 Gotta laugh at their attempt to save money.
WAG here. If the buyer emailed you with ebay’s default settings, she probably got a blurb like this emailed back to herself because the default settings do a Bcc to the emailer with this text:
This probably caused her to think her email was being monitored and she sent a CYA email back. I’m not saying it isn’t possible that her email was being monitored but it probably isn’t likely unless ebay’s IT dept. is better staffed than most IT departments.
I always thought that the expression came from baseball…