There is an item I’m thinking of bidding for on EBay, but the seller’s feedback gives me some cause for concern - almost half of the items he/she has either bought or sold are listed as “private”, i.e. there is no link to the item number on the feedback screen. This is particularly true of the items he/she has sold, where 8 out of 10 are “private”. The non-private items he/she has sold are both PC wallpaper images of scantily clad women.
Other alarm bells - total feedback is 25 (mine is only 50 or so, so that’s not a deal-breaker, we all have to start at the bottom), his/her feedback left for others seems to be automated, as it’s the same comment each time & a couple of the items he/she’s bought have been “how to get rich on EBay” books.
Am I right to be concerned, or could he/she be selling things privately quite legitimately?
My general feeling is that anything that raises any suspicion about an ebay deal is enough to make me skip it.
There are hundreds of other sellers out there, offering very similar items. I’ll move on to someone else, who doesn’t have any red flags (or even faint pink ones).
There are legitimate reasons for auctions to be private, other than “adult” material. For instance, I used to create bundles of html auction templates and files with instructions for personalizing and reselling them. I would then sell them to other sellers, who would sell the individual templates as their own. These auctions would be private, so the buyers of the individual templates wouldn’t know the seller’s source (me). I can see why a “How To Get Rich on Ebay” item would work the same way.
But…
It has been my experience (8 years worth), that excessive use of “private” for either auctions or feedback, should be cause for wariness.
He could; some transactions are like that because of the sensitive nature of the goods, or because the buyer asked the seller nicely to list it that way, because it was a gift for someone who might see the feedback.
But in your case, i think it’s suspicious; buying wallpapers and ebooks for pennies is how con artists pump their feedback. Find another seller, I would.
FWIW I’ve been a long term user of eBay and hiding feedback by staying private sets off alarms for me. I avoid those sellers like the plague. Why take a chance when there are so many more open sellers out there?
Yeah, but multiple purchasing of ebooks and wallpapers is a danger sign (unless he’s just doing it to make the block of private FBs fall off the front page)