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Seller cancelling an auction.
Are there repercussions, either financial or other, when a seller ends an auction? As a buyer, I am committed to the buy and cannot back out of an auction once the bid is accepted, unless there is a higher bidder. I have recently had an auction ended at the last minute when the bids placed weren't favorable to the seller. There was no reserve set on the auction. The reason given was "there was an error in the listing". Funny how there was no error for a full week until 10 minutes before the end of auction and the seller was going to have to sell. What baffles me is that the seller has over 14k sales and a 100% positive feedback.
1 comment
woodland_gnome
·1 year agoIt 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).