In pursuit of my hobby of building electric guitars I came to eBay in search of unfinished guitar bodies hoping I might find something that caught my eye and was within my limited budget. While scrolling through the first page of 240 listings of 2300 total I found several that seemed to be what I was looking for. However, on that page of 240 listings I found 44 were of exactly the same item (same photos in each listing) at nearly the same price (give or take a few cents) and all were from different sellers. Although most of these sellers were located in Monroe Township, New Jersey some of them were in China.
I can appreciate that a seller, with a large inventory, might use a stock photo to represent their product but I can't help but find it suspicious that there would be so many different sellers all displaying the same photos of the same product and nearly all of them being sold from the same location. What also strikes me as odd about it is that most of these sellers have high feedback scores. One has 112,322 at 98.7%, another has 5,621 at 99.8%, another has 243,597 at 98.5...
The bottom line is that under these circumstances I just don't know what to do. I'd like to buy one of these unfinished guitar bodies but I just don't understand these multiple listing from different sellers of the same item. And I wonder what eBay's position is on something like this. Is this normal? Is this OK? Are these sellers genuine? Reputable? Or is there some sort of scam afoot?
