Cancelling bids when an item isnt doing as well as they thought it would?

[llandarr]

Hi All,

I'm new to this Community chat, so please be gentle 😉

I started bidding on an item yesterday and late last night my bid was cancelled by the seller. I thought I'd be polite and send a message asking what the problem was, and they have replied saying "not enough interest". 

There was no reserve on the item, so I thought, with just over 1 day to go, I was in a good position.

Are sellers allowed to cancel bids and their listing for this reason??

Thanks in advance,

Rich

[slyders_finds]

Ebay tolerates it, but sellers are not suppose to do it. Ebay has this new "Experience" that they have rolled out saying it will affect sellers standing in a small way. Not very clear how much it really demotes account. BTW, why do people alway use the "Kid with guitar jumping" profile picture. Is it an inside joke? 

[nobody*s_perfect]

eBay allows sellers to end listings early because sometimes there is a valid reason, such as the item was lost or broken..  But eBay does not like to see disappointed bidders, such as yourself, so they penalize sellers by charging them a fee equal to what the final value fee would have been for the ended listing.

[slyders_finds]

*they may charge. Not always. 

[mudshark61369]

@llandarr,

If there is more than 12 hours left in an auction, a seller can cancel bids and end it.  Usually, it is new sellers who take ebay's bad advice to "start auctions at a low price, to encourage bidding" who do that. New or inexperienced sellers often do not know that experience bidders do not bid until the last minutes of an auction, and there can be other issues after an auction, that they do not know about as well.

As for setting a reserve price, experienced sellers do that by setting their starting bid, to the least amount they will accept, if there's only one bid.  There is an added fee to set a reserve price.

Did you check the seller's feedback profile page before bidding?  If you didn't, do that and you may find that despite a fair number of feedback and a 100% rating, it is all for buying not selling at least in the last 12 months.  That is just one reason why you should check each seller's feedback profile page before bidding on or buying their items.

FYI, You have posted your question on the U.S. based site (ebay.com).  In this instance your home site (ebay.co.uk) and the U.S. site's policy on ending auctions early are the same. But in other cases the policies may differ somewhat. So you should double check which site shows in your address bar when asking about policies on the Community. 

[woodland_gnome]

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.  This is considered fee avoidance because eBay charges a substantial fee for sellers to have a Reserve Price so they aren't promising to sell as low as their Starting Price.

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 can only be done before the countdown reaches 12 hours  AND it charges a fee (the FVF% for that seller in that category 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).

[r_lresale]

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@slyders_finds wrote:

BTW, why do people alway use the "Kid with guitar jumping" profile picture. Is it an inside joke? 

So I'm not the only one that noticed the pictures....thought I was going crazy or something lol

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[simba6]

What that seller does not seem to know is most bids come in in the final seconds of a listing.  eBay did impose a rule that the seller can't end the auction in the final 12 hours if it has a bid.  They can cancel bids but the auction stays up and a last second bid or snipe won't allow time to cancel it.

That just leads to a sale with price even lower.  They can then refuse to sell but will get a serious NPS strike and risk bad feedback.

But no a seller is not suppose to do that. 

[frankenhobbit]

If I want something, I bid my max bid in the last 6-8 seconds. I don't nibble. I'm not even a little bit alone in doing this. 

So canceling bids that look low is not a great idea for the seller, especially if it has watchers. 

[llandarr]

Thank you so much for all the replies. Every single one of them have been so helpful.

Just further to this, as my bid was placed with about 1 day and 12 left, so I guess this has taught me a lesson....

I did send the person a message asking what happened and if everything is OK, and they told me there "wasn't enough interest" I mean, what the f..... 

Anyway, they went on to tell me that they'd sold the item (presumably elsewhere) for £15. My bid was £5.

The seller clearly didn't have the etiquette to contact me and tell me what was going on....

You live and learn, I guess... 

[mudshark61369]

@llandarr,

Some of the things you wrote today, further leads me to believe you were dealing with a new or very inexperienced seller.  They cancelled bids without messaging the bidders as ebay suggests, and it seems they also had the item available for sale on another venue.  That's why checking the feedback profile of any seller whose item you intend to buy or bid on, before bidding/buying is important. 

[soh.maryl]

How do you know this?