Don't blame eBay. Blame the "bidder" who bid first THEN made an unsolicited offer for the item. If there were no bids to cancel you could have revised the listing to add a BIN (or revised the BIN if there already was one, in which case it is worse because s/he could have used it while it was there or if you did end early it would be with no bids so you wouldn't have been charged.
It is specifically against the rules for a seller to cancel all bids and end the auction early without a winner IF it is because s/he deliberately set the Starting Price lower than s/he was willing to sell for, and it hasn't reached that high. But there are legitimate reasons why a seller would have to do so, and a few years ago eBay got tired of having to divine the subjective intent of a seller who took that action, so it adopted some procedures that make it less attractive to do so with that intention: it may only be done before the countdown reaches 12 hours AND it charges a fee (generally the FVF% times the highest cancelled bid) when s/he does so (with the first such fee per calendar year waived to allow for the very occasional legitimate reason for doing so).
wooden_flower Volunteer Community Mentor.
