eBay

snelling7 · ‎08-13-2017

Hi,

im thinking of selling a pretty unique truck on eBay. The truck is 14 years old. I've never sold a car or truck on eBay and - even after reading everything I can find - I'm still intimidated.

My biggest concern is protection as a seller. I want to fully disclose everything about the truck and want to sell, "as is - no warranty". I just don't want anyone to come back to me after the sell.

I also don't know whether to go local or national and the safest way to accept payment.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

omgitlightsup · ‎08-26-2017

@legitimate_bidder wrote:
Yeah, imagine if this went on at a real-life/live auction: People bid on the cars, then decide that they don't want them, and could walk away scot-free. Half the cars would be unsold; you'd have to bring your car back next week, or pay to store it there; and the auction house would be out of bidness 🙂 in about a month. Winning bidders could strong-arm you by offering way less than what they bid, and saying "Take it, or I'll walk, and you'll have to run it again next time!".

Only snowflake internet nerds with no real-life auction, much less automotive experience would devise a system with such inequalities, and do absolutely NOTHING to hold bidders accountable- especially on big-ticket items! And not even allow the possibility of leaving them negative feedback, no less!

I frequently draw parallels between eBay and auction houses, live auctions, estate sales, etc...

The most common rebuttal I hear is that eBay is not a live auction house.

If you attend an auto auction you are entering into specific contract terms with the auctioneer, and that is a totally different scenario from what happens when you reach across the globe on eBay to connect with a car seller.

I've bought two cars on eBay, and I love it. I just think you need to understand that eBay motors is not like bidding on a rare Pokémon card on the other half of eBay. The user agreements are very different.

That in mind I guess it would be prudent to add to the above wisdom that eBay motors is not eBay.

legitimate_bidder · ‎08-26-2017

@omgitlightsup wrote:
@legitimate_bidder wrote:
Yeah, imagine if this went on at a real-life/live auction: People bid on the cars, then decide that they don't want them, and could walk away scot-free. Half the cars would be unsold; you'd have to bring your car back next week, or pay to store it there; and the auction house would be out of bidness 🙂 in about a month. Winning bidders could strong-arm you by offering way less than what they bid, and saying "Take it, or I'll walk, and you'll have to run it again next time!".

Only snowflake internet nerds with no real-life auction, much less automotive experience would devise a system with such inequalities, and do absolutely NOTHING to hold bidders accountable- especially on big-ticket items! And not even allow the possibility of leaving them negative feedback, no less!
I frequently draw parallels between eBay and auction houses, live auctions, estate sales, etc...

The most common rebuttal I hear is that eBay is not a live auction house.

If you attend an auto auction you are entering into specific contract terms with the auctioneer, and that is a totally different scenario from what happens when you reach across the globe on eBay to connect with a car seller.

I've bought two cars on eBay, and I love it. I just think you need to understand that eBay motors is not like bidding on a rare Pokémon card on the other half of eBay. The user agreements are very different.

That in mind I guess it would be prudent to add to the above wisdom that eBay motors is not eBay.

That does not at all address the issues of why it is that on Ebay, recreational bidders/people with buyer's remorse/etc. can interfere with auctions with no consequence; and why it is that the seller must bear all of the risk, while the bidder does not even get a slap on the wrist.

There are other websites/online auctions where bidders are held accountable for their actions/choices, so the mere fact that Ebay is an online venue and that the vehicles can be thousands of miles away is irrelevant.

At Copart it is common to get bidders from South America and Africa bidding on cars here in the US- cars on which the only info they have is that provided by the venue (Which is the risk that they accept when they bid).

omgitlightsup · ‎08-26-2017

@legitimate_bidder wrote:
That does not at all address the issues of why it is that on Ebay, recreational bidders/people with buyer's remorse/etc. can interfere with auctions with no consequence; and why it is that the seller must bear all of the risk, while the bidder does not even get a slap on the wrist.

Agreed 100%

I think that if eBay tries to resemble something else, it should be implied that wherever practical, it behaves like that something else behaves.

In this case, eBay Motors attempts to look like eBay, and it attempts to look like an online car auction, but its behavior is more like that of the "Nickel" or a regular old classifieds listing, but with competitive bidding.

If anyone is allowed to bid on a car and "win" it without actually paying, there should be a much easier process by which the seller can reactivate the listing or recover any final value fees.

But I think eBay is in a tough position here. On the one hand they want to get lots and lots of money and are afraid that sellers will collect payments and then claim the car never sold. And on the other hand.. well I doubt eBay sees it any other way.

If they don't provide the services of an auction house they have no business charging the fees for those services.

legitimate_bidder · ‎08-27-2017

@omgitlightsup wrote:
@legitimate_bidder wrote:
That does not at all address the issues of why it is that on Ebay, recreational bidders/people with buyer's remorse/etc. can interfere with auctions with no consequence; and why it is that the seller must bear all of the risk, while the bidder does not even get a slap on the wrist.

Agreed 100%

I think that if eBay tries to resemble something else, it should be implied that wherever practical, it behaves like that something else behaves.

In this case, eBay Motors attempts to look like eBay, and it attempts to look like an online car auction, but its behavior is more like that of the "Nickel" or a regular old classifieds listing, but with competitive bidding.

If anyone is allowed to bid on a car and "win" it without actually paying, there should be a much easier process by which the seller can reactivate the listing or recover any final value fees.

But I think eBay is in a tough position here. On the one hand they want to get lots and lots of money and are afraid that sellers will collect payments and then claim the car never sold. And on the other hand.. well I doubt eBay sees it any other way.

If they don't provide the services of an auction house they have no business charging the fees for those services.

Agreed!

I think Ebay could accomplish a lot very simply, by mandating that in order to bid on items (Vehicles or otherwise) over a certain dollar amount (say...$500 or $1000) that a bidder must have a credit card on file with Ebay from which a seller=specified non-refundable deposit will be deducted when the bidder is the winning bidder or does a buy-it-now.

People tend to magically get educated and gain a sense of responsibility when it affects their wallet. 🙂

That's why many of us, when selling vehicles these days on Ebay, only use Buy-It-Now- because we can check the box that says "Require immediate deposit", which means that the purchaser can't take out item off of the market until they've paid the specified deposit.

It's a shame, because sometimes -like with rare or unique vehicles- auctions can be more lucrative (We used to love to run auctions starting at a dollar with no reserve!) - but for years now, it's been a waste of time doing auctions, because 90% of the time we'd never hear from the winning bidder, because he has no stake in the matter; no obligation to pay. He may've just been some 12 year-old playing on the computer; or someone dreaming; or someone who got over-ruled by his wife...or a competitor who just wanted to take our item off the market for a week or two so it wouldn't compete with theirs.

Letting someone sign up for an Ebay account with nothing more than a working email address, and then allowing them to bid on a $30K item, is just insanity!

I mean, you bid at Copart and don't pay, you're going to lose at least $400- and maybe several thousand......

legitimate_bidder · ‎08-27-2017

Heh.....a while back, a friend of mine called me up and told me he just won a POS Belarus tractor at an auction for $10K!

I informed him that he wouldn't get half of that when selling the tractor, so he wanted out of the deal. Ended up costing him $1,000 to walk away!

omgitlightsup · ‎08-27-2017

TBH if I had not had that freedom when buying my two eBay cars I would never have bid.

I do like the way it's set up. One of the cars, I drove 100 miles to pick up, with the understanding that if there was something wrong with it, I would be out the gas money and time. I realize that the seller would also be out his valuable time and listing fees, but that's how car sales go sometimes. It's not anybody's fault. If eBay required me to put cash down on it before leaving my house, I would have shopped elsewhere. I might miss out on a bargain, but I was looking for a car, not a bargain.

I think eBay should allow bidders to compete for a car, but also allow sellers to be flexible with who they sell to. If you put a car out in the street with a for sale sign, and two people are waving money in your face, you have no implicit obligation to sell to the one waving more money.

Anything else is just eBay being greedy. If they turn it into an auction house, then it will mean the disapparance of private sellers, exactly the way that Asian dropshippers have edged out "normal people" in the rest of eBay. There are other, far cheaper ways to sell cars online, and it's better for eBay and all of us if they collect a small fee than no fee at all.

legitimate_bidder · ‎08-27-2017

Yes, there are inherent risks to purchasing vehicles without seeing them first- and quite frankly, I am not willing to take such risks, except in regards to people whom I know and trust. I do think that the purchaser does have to bear a part of that risk, by at least risking a deposit. The seller also bears risks, by having no guarantee that the vehicle will be actually sold- and therefore may have to store it longer, or get a lower amount for it if it must be run two or more times, etc.

The way it is set-up now on Ebay, in most cases, the bidder has no risk whatsoever, which creates a great inequality, which other venues have resolved in such a way which tend to retain serious purchasers, while discouraging others.

Even if it were like it used to be, where negative feedback could be left for buyers so that subsquent sellers could block them from bidding, that would go a long way.

shaed36 · ‎01-04-2019

We listed our Miata via Buy it Now and got a 'Buy' within a couple days. When the 'buyer' didn't pay the deposit, we contacted him and he said he mistakenly hit the Buy button one night while sitting on the toilet. So we had to got through the whole extraction process with eBay, reversal of fees, etc. A time-consuming hassle. We waited a few days to relist the car. Another sale! But not. This time no deposit, no response to emails, so we went through the whole reversal of fees process with eBay. This morning we got a charge from eBay for $143 for this 'sale'! I'm thinking eBay motors is treacherous waters.

atikovi · ‎01-04-2019

List it with "IMMEDIATE DEPOSIT REQUIRED" and you won't have that problem.

mr.elmwood · ‎01-04-2019

Zombie thread.

shaed36 · ‎02-13-2019

We sold a 20 year old Miata on eBay Motors that we'd owned 12 years and kept garaged, serviced, etc. New top, new innards. Eventually, it spent far more time in the garage than in early days, so we decided to sell it. Kelley Blue book advised $4,600 for age/condition, but we set the Reserve at $4,200. There were many bids and finally a man hit $5,901. Seventeen hundred dollars over the Reserve seemed foolhardy for a car he'd never bothered to see, but we assumed he knew what he was doing. Our concern rose when he had to divide the payment. $5,000 would be paid by someone, a family member perhaps, and he'd pay the final $1,700 through his own account. Hm. We feared he might be immature and in a dream state or something. Sadly, we were right. Within hours after the transporter delivered the car, he was writing emails complaining about the condition. Apparently, he was expecting 100 points from the Pebble Beach Concours. He didn't seem to comprehend that a car driven for 2 decades is bound to show a little wear. We'd posted 12 un-photo shopped photos of all sides, described nicks on the passenger side door (careless neighbor), but all-in-all it was in good condition. We never said excellent or showroom. This morning he left a scathing feedback. Our first negative feedback in 19 years on eBay. I wish we'd tried to sell it locally.

atikovi · ‎02-13-2019

@shaed36 wrote:
Kelley Blue book advised $4,600 for age/condition, but we set the Reserve at $4,200. There were many bids and finally a man hit $5,901... This morning he left a scathing feedback. Our first negative feedback in 19 years on eBay. I wish we'd tried to sell it locally.

For $1700 more than I expected, I'll take the neg.

mr.elmwood · ‎02-13-2019

Yep.

sukmcavo0 · ‎05-03-2019

That's what I thought years ago, but it's not about 6 different cars but about 6 listings. If you relist the same vehicle 5 times, eBay will move you into the "high volume vehicle seller" category for the next 1000 years. You won't get the 6 free vehicle listings per year anymore in this life. eBay tricked me into relisting my vehicle for the 5th time because I thought that I would get a warning but this assumption was wrong: they didn't charge me the listing fee which they should have charged me when my free listings were used up and when I complained about it, the answer was "we didn't charge you the listing fee because it was a promotion" (if I had seen a listing fee it would have made it clear to me that I had used up my free listings).

mr.elmwood · ‎05-03-2019

The epitome of the deselect, rather than the select. eBay uses this trick in a lot of ways.

It was a few years back, there was a deselect hidden in the terms of agreement, that everyone blindly ticks as read. It became a phalanx of "Whadda mean I chose this? I didn't choose this!". "Yes, you did, you choose this by not deselecting it. Doesn't matter that we hid it from you, giggle giggle.".

eBay likes to hide things, in the interest of excellence in customer service. Now, go watch the Capital One commercials with Peggy.