Unable to purchase auction item
When I bid on an auction item I get outbid and then the exact same item is relisted immediately by a different seller.
Looks like the sellers are making their own high bids and retracting if no one outbids them.
This is unfair to buyers.
For example, search for items having description,
294G Amazing Natural Ocean
or
2.16LB Natural Ocean Jasper
(turn on filter to see completed items)
Both of these items are still listed.
2 comments
mudshark61369
·3 years ago@syr_3309,
I used your second search suggestion, and found what i expected to find. Your seller is registered in China, All of their listings are Private listing (Bidders identities protected) They start their auctions at .99¢, and within a day or so one bidder places an automatic bid which others bid against. The seller has a poor by ebay standards for a high volume seller, feedback percentage of 99.5%
The seller has also posted that auction, using the same photos many times. They may not have relisted the same auction over and over without actually selling it, but use the photos over and over, which is a violation of ebay policy.
You may want to learn about automatic bidding by opening the link below.
https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/bidding/bidding?id=4003
You should avoid Chinese sellers who list items like those, with very low starting bid prices. There is not a good reason for items like those to be listed as a Private listing, with identities protected. Before bidding on any chinese sellers auctions, you should check their feedback profile page, which you do by clicking in the number in ( ) to the right of their username. Yours is currently (9). On the page that opens you will see a few recent feedback comments but click on the Oval with See all feedback in it. On that page if a seller has received negative or neutral feedback, you can click on the numbers of those, to read only those comments.
Chances are the bidder you were bidding against works with the seller. Doing that violates ebay's policies about shill bidding. Unfortunately, it can't be proved by ebay, if they are careful.
woodland_gnome
·3 years agoWhat you are suspecting is called SHILLING:
It is illegal.
It is against the rules.
It is impossible to do so with the selling ID, and eBay also blocks bids from other accounts that it has tagged as being associated with the seller account (including some accounts that have been wrongly tagged as such, at least according to those who have posted here after having been so blocked).
eBay also investigates reports of shill bidding (there is a Report item link on each listing, and "Seller is using other accounts to inflate item price" is in the menu it leads to) to some extent and has other software in place to try to find shill bidders and does take action against them, though this is shrouded in secrecy so we have no idea how succesful it is.
But it still happens, more often than it should and less often than it is suspected by some (most posters coming here suspicious of a particular auction turn out to be misunderstanding how bidding works, how bid history is displayed, or how other legitimate people might bid, or how many bad bidders there are out there who request cancellation if they win or simply don't pay). Trying to decide how to bid based on clues that may or may not be accurate is an exercise in futility: if you set your level of suspicion required to act (not bid) high, you'll get false negatives and you open yourself up to being shilled by that seller; if low, you'll get a lot of false positives, and miss out on some good deals, in the middle and you'll get a mixture of false postives and false negatives so it's still unreliable.
The best way to protect yourself against shilling is to wait until the last minute to place your true maximum bid, which you have calculated (ideally hours or days before; I recommend using a "snipe service" to place the bid--there are reliable and secure free ones) without regard to the prior bidding on the item. If you don't let prior shill bids affect YOUR bid amount, and you don't give the shiller time to probe YOUR bid to base HIS bid on the amount of yours, the price you pay if you win will be based on a legitimate underbid or on the seller's true minimum within an increment or so.