Seller pulled item 3 days from auction deadline after I submitted a winning bid. If I bid I have to

Question

if I bid I buy, if you are selling you should have to provide reason you are pulling it out of the auction.

woodland_gnome · Answer

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.

The reason given (or rather chosen--eBay likes short menus of reasons) is displayed at top left of the completed listing page. In this case it is almost certainly NOT because of deliberate avoidance of the Reserve Price Fee since sellers who do that wait until much closer to the 12 hour deadline (see below) to give the bidders a chance to get it up to the seller's minimum.

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).

So a seller can end an auction early without a winner, AND a buyer can not pay for the item s/he won (or lie and retract the bid before the 12 hour deadline--and the consequences for either action are far less than the seller faces for ending an auction without a winner: cold hard cash).

inceptions · Answer

You may have had the high bid but not the winning bid. The winning bid is determined at the end of the auction. The seller may have had one of many reasons to pull the auction, for example there may have been a mistake in the listing.